Transcript of #2492 - Ari Shaffir New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. You know what you are on my phone? What? Ari the Wanderer.

That's a new phone number. That's not bad.

That's a new number. Because that's what you are. Oh, I was telling you last night that I thought it was in Mexico City, but we had a report that you were at an Oasis concert in Mexico City, and you said no, it was in Rio.

São Paulo.

Oh, São Paulo? Okay, so it was in Brazil. So no one knew where you were. You were gone for how many months? 6?

7. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

How many times have you done that now?

I guess 3, although when I went to Ecuador, I was very much in touch with everybody. So it was like—

That was a halfway.

That was halfway.

But you were there, you were kind of checked out.

I was gone for 6 months, but I was in touch. I still had numbers. I was still like doing like podcasts and stuff and Were you doing them remotely? Doing them remotely, yeah. I would do one with Big Jay and Soder. We did a 21 Jump Street Breakdown podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah. We were so bored during the pandemic. We were like, let's find a show and just let's get together.

And watch 21 Jump Street.

First we chose Sex and the City and then found out gay fucking Ian already had a Sex and the City podcast. Do you like—

Do you like Fire Dance?

Yeah.

Did he really?

Dude, that guy blows dudes. Obviously he loves Sex and the City.

Well, I guess so.

So we're like, we don't wanna step on his toes, like let's pick another.

He seems like he's straight sometimes.

He does.

It's weird. Mm-hmm. Like, is he only gay?

No, no, he fucks. He fucks better than we ever did. For women.

Women? Yeah. Okay.

He gets it.

So, and then, but then he went to guys?

He's a new breed. He's a new breed of just like.

When did he go to guys? Is that a new thing?

I think he battled with it for a while.

Oh, okay, so he was fucking girls but hating them? God, I wish you were a guy. Like that kind of a deal?

Yeah, yeah, I guess. Then he went to glory holes and he was saying he wasn't gay. I'm like, bro, that's one of the biggest signs of a gay.

So you just stick your hole— your dick in the hole, or you suck the dick that comes out of the hole? Like, was he the glory giver or the glory taker?

You're asking me questions I don't know. I always assumed in my head it was he was sucking dudes off, but, but I'm, I'm actually not sure. Yeah.

Interesting, right?

It's interesting.

Yeah. Because if the dick comes through the hole, if you like, you ever want to suck a dick, but I don't want to look a guy in the eyes. I just want to know what it's like. See if I'm good at it.

Yeah. I don't want to be embarrassed in front of anybody. They're going to recognize me later. I just want to work on my technique. Yeah.

I just want to find out if I'm right.

Yeah. I need more research. Not enough data points.

Yeah. Because so you didn't even ask him which side of the glory hole he was on?

I think I was so overwhelmed by this heterosexual dude who was telling me he goes to glory holes.

And so then he was heterosexual. This is back in the day.

We did a podcast, my old podcast, on the way down to like somewhere.

This is Skeptic Tank?

Yeah. And he was telling me that, but he was telling me he's not gay. And I was like, how do I say that? Wait. And I was like, buddy, I think you are gay. He goes, why? I'm like, the glory hole stuff. It's a big sign. He goes, wow. Do you think?

I was like. Do you think?

I was like.

But you didn't even, that's the crazy thing is you didn't even ask. To ask whether he sucks or gets sucked.

I was lost in it. You're right, as an interviewer, I didn't do my job that day. Obviously, that's a major question. It's a 1 in 2 chance.

Yeah, right? How do you not know?

How do I—

yeah, it's like very important to know.

It is, because there is a percentage chance it might be a chick blowing you. There's no percentage— there's 0% chance the chick blowing you is a vagina.

0% chance. It's 100% a guy, or a guy pretending to be a chick.

I bet there's a ton of those dudes who have wives, you know, who live in that world. Like, I thought— I always thought it was a woman. Like, shut up.

Yeah, right. Shut up. Yeah, plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability.

Yeah. So then he just decided to just go straight gay?

No, he's everywhere. He does everything.

Oh, now he's like Miami bisexual.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we did this 21 Jump Street podcast, and, uh, and I would do it sometimes. I'd get on, they're like, are you drinking a coconut with a palm tree behind you? Like, out of a coconut? I was like, oh, it's just a Tuesday, guys. What's going on? I really milk it.

'Cause you're in Ecuador.

'Cause I was in Ecuador. I was having a good time.

What is that gay tea you drink?

Mate? Sherba?

So you just got into this, it's literally a jar of hay.

It really is.

And you pour hot water and there's so much hay in there.

It's so much, it tastes, you tried it. Yeah. Yeah, it tastes like just kind of ass. Like hay? Yeah, just hay.

I don't understand.

It's like a ritual. It's all the gauchos in Argentina and then spread to Chile and southern—

And so it's just a bunch of leaves that are in a yerba tree. Yerba mate, right?

Yeah, but that drink is like different.

I've had that stuff.

I think it's different. Really? Yeah, I think it's about as much as like what Willie Nelson's like drink is actually weed.

Oh, Willie Nelson's drink is weed.

Really?

Oh yeah.

I take it back then.

Oh yeah. I don't know. What the legality of that is. I don't wanna throw anybody under the bus, but Ron White brought a bunch of it to the Mothership, and it's very legit. Yeah, it's all dose-dependent. I think one glass is like 5 milligrams, or one shot is like 5 milligrams. But if you drink a glass of that shit, yeah, you're gonna go into that weird dimension. You know that weird dimension where you're like, I think this is Earth, but it doesn't seem like Earth anymore.

Something's off.

It's like a facsimile of Earth.

Try to look at people like, you see what I'm seeing?

Yeah. I remember one time I was doing Fear Factor and we were in San Francisco and back— this is the unregulated edibles days, you know, because this is before marijuana was legal.

Do your joke.

Where you could get a prescription.

Do your joke. Can I do your joke?

Which one? The X. Oh yeah.

I'll do it. You'll be impressed. Okay, okay. Because this is early days. And by the way, it was just like, there's banana bread, uh, going around right now. It's killing people. It's great. Not killing people, but like destroying people. Yeah, he goes, they came in these doses: 1x, 2x, or 3x. The problem is x didn't equal any number. Yeah, so it was just some guy mixing up his bathtub full of fucking whatever, like weed-infused cookie dough, and deciding what's x to him. That's not a mathematical equation.

X had no number value.

So it's 1 times this. What's this, right?

Yeah, well, I had the joke too about the gummy bear. The guy literally said that to me. I go, how much should I take? He goes, just a leg.

Los gummy bear manos.

I go, just the leg? I go, why the fuck are you selling whole bears if I should only eat it like— 'Cause it's only that big. Like, no one's gonna eat just the leg.

It's a crazy dosage. Half a cookie is the right— That's not— All cookie is a dose.

So back in these days, we were doing Fear Factor, and we were doing it— It was, uh, we were doing it off of an aircraft carrier in the Bay Area. We had to take the— you know that one train, I forget what it is, is it the BART that goes under the water? That goes under the bay between Oakland and San Francisco?

The BART? Yeah.

BART, whatever it is.

No, I call it the BART just to fuck with them.

So I took this edible and it was an unregulated edible, so I have no idea, and it was way too strong. And I was like, why do my ears feel weird? And they're like, because you're under the ocean. And I was like, no! It was like the longest 20 minutes of my life waiting to pop out on the other side. I was like, we're under this. How long has this fucking subway been under the ocean? Like, how long has this existed? Like, what are the odds this thing is still good? Is anybody out there diving, checking on the tube, making sure there's no holes in it? You know, this fucking—

you start doing all the research in your head.

And it was like, I felt like I was talking to people, but what I was seeing was a two-dimensional like, you know, like those stand-ins, like when you go to the movie and it's like, you know, a person standing there like thumbs up, but it's like just a two-dimensional cardboard cutout. That's what everybody looked like to me. It was like a two-dimensional cardboard cutout. But occasionally I'd see their soul peeking around their shoulder. Yeah, I mean, it was so heavy. I don't know what the number was. Don't you miss how many X's?

That kind of high? I don't get that kind of high or drunk anymore.

Well, that kind of high is really fun. It's so fun.

After it's over. When you look back.

When it's happening, it's terrifying.

Oh, that was the best.

Remember a guy I did jiu-jitsu with? He made pills. He made THC pills because he was like one of those all-day guys. He was just high constantly, all the time. And so yeah, the dab guys, but this is pre-dabs.

Yeah.

And so this guy made pills, THC pills. I go, how many should you take? And he goes, you should probably start off with one, but I take two. So I took two because I'm an asshole. And I wound up having this conversation with this guy, and he was weirding me out. It was at a jiu-jitsu tournament. I was like, why is this guy so weird?

Super soul.

Turns out the dude eventually got arrested for rape. And not just arrested for rape, but he was on the run. Whoa. And he was on the run and couldn't stop doing jiu-jitsu. And the way they caught him was he went to, like, Seattle or somewhere, like, 'cause this was in California.

He'd sign up for classes?

And he was just rolling, but he was killing everybody. And everyone was like, who is this fucking guy? Like, why is this guy so good? And then eventually they realized it was him. They go, oh my God, this guy's wanted for rape. Wow. He was a crazy person. And when I was like super high on these pills, I could see all the crazy in his eyes. I could see— like, he didn't say anything crazy.

Dude, you can— when you're on drugs, you can see through people.

Yes, you can. You can. You can see their soul.

It's, it's interesting.

It is.

You really can see it. It's not one of those where I'm like, no, it was just the drug fucking with me. You can tell.

And so this was like happy or sad. A year or so later, later he gets arrested and winds up fleeing. I think he maybe was out on bail or he was wanted and fleed and went to the Pacific Northwest. But I remember when I heard the story, I was like, oh, that makes sense, because he had the weirdest energy, just like this dark energy, like creepy dark energy.

Sometimes if you're on like a psychedelic and then someone's not on with you, you know, but they're around you. You're like, hey, you got to go. You're freaking me out. Like, I don't know, your energy is not of this. It's— I don't know if you're looking at me, but like, you got to take off.

Yeah, you see like motivations.

You see everything so clearly.

I know, it's weird, but it's not reliable. It's not like, like, I'm about to go into a meeting with this defendant. I need to know if he's actually innocent or guilty, so I'm going to take 5 grams of mushrooms, stare through his soul.

Me and Big Jay were leaving Bluesfest in Ottawa once. We were leaving, it's like a city festival, but then you wander into what used to be the safest city in Canada, so you're all fucked up, it's great. And as you're leaving, you just see who's on what drug. Like, you just can tell, like mushrooms, acid, weed, drunk. Molly. Molly, yeah, you just see it all. You just see through everybody. They're just sitting there talking.

Yeah, I don't, I wonder what's gonna happen now that this, thing happen?

I thought, first of all, I thought, you know, I'm out on the news, so I'm hearing stuff little by little about everything.

Yeah.

I thought it was just ibogaine, which is like, great, those people need that. And then, and then, I mean, Ed Clay has been telling me about that for so long.

Well, Ed Clay, I talked about him on the podcast because he was one of the ways that I found out.

Me too. Yeah. In Nashville.

Yeah, yeah, right.

And he would tell you, he's like, you should get on it, it helps with addiction. I'm like, I'm loving what I'm doing right now. I don't want to get off this high.

Yeah, I don't need to fuck up my high.

But like, I'm like, this makes sense. And then, fine, great, you got that, and then I find out it's also, I mean, the best hippie flip. You got that MDMA and boomers and shrooms.

And psilocybin, yeah. Well, it's because MDMA and psilocybin, MAPS was already doing MDMA studies with veterans. So for people that had watched a bunch of people get blown up and lost their friends and come back, MDMA was one of the best therapies. For helping them overcome PTSD. So MAPS had already pushed that through, and Johns Hopkins had already done these studies with psilocybin. So they already pushed these things, and they were already on the way to getting approval through the FDA, but the problem was nobody wants to stick their neck out and sign off on it.

It's a problem with politics. If you're running, we talked about this, if you're running for an office and the opponent can say, "He wants drugs legalized," then you're fucked. So it's like it really binds your hands.

Well, that's funny because that's kind of what Dan Patrick did in Texas about marijuana. But to his credit, Dan Patrick met with Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard, the guys that passed this Texas Ibogaine initiative, and they convinced him of what this stuff actually is. And so they've donated— so he's allocated, rather, $100 million in Texas for the Ibogaine initiative, which is amazing.

When I was in—

so he— but that's a sign of an intelligent man. Like, this Dan Patrick guy had this stance on weed. There's like, weed's bad, it's ruining everything. And then they come to him and he's like, I am staunchly opposed to this. And they sit down with him. He explains, Brian Hubbard explains, and he's very eloquent, explained what ibogaine does. It's not recreational at all. And he hears it and he hears how much it'll help, particularly veterans that come back that are addicted to opiates and they're all fucked up. And even CTE, even like brain injuries from getting blown up. It's neuroregenerative somehow. It's a crazy plant. And so he, to his credit, he signed off. And they allocated $100 million for the Texas Ibogaine Initiative, which is amazing. Wow. But it's like all these people have these ideas in their head, but it's all because of Nixon. All of it goes back to Nixon administration.

Well, you grew up with probably, "This is evil." This is— you'll get stuck that way kind of stuff, where it's like—

I think some people do.

Yeah.

This is what's important about these studies.

It gets some people. Yes.

This is what's important about these studies. Like, I think this is important about weed too. You know, I'm— very adamant that it's not for everybody. I think there's a lot of things—

so strong.

Some of it's so strong, and some people are already on the way to schizo. They're already on the way. There's schizophrenia in their family. There's like— they just— that's not a good thing for them.

Well, what's making a comeback luckily is like Mexican weed, is like the 12% THC where it's like, let's just get— be— yeah, dude, the old days. I'm trying to bury myself in this movie again.

I don't want to go to Pluto.

Yeah, just— is there anything?

Is there I wanna be in the clouds right above the city, that's it.

What's the shot in a beer of weed? I want that.

That's it, right. I don't wanna fucking dab. I see these dabbers, oh these kids.

I asked for mids in a dispensary once and they're like, what are you, what?

What is that? Mids?

They're all so hardcore.

I remember the early days, it was like Zen Dispensary, one of the early ones, and I was like just getting into it. Atari hooked me up, remember that guy with like weed? And it was like, okay, so now I'm into it. And I went to it, Zen, and I was like, hey, listen, I like to smoke cigarettes while I write. I'm off cigarettes now, but it's a habit, so I need something. But if I smoke a joint, I'm done writing, right? And that's what they say. Oh, you want Mexican weed? We can do that for you.

Oh, just something calm, just like mild. Yeah, it's like going to a powerlifting gym and saying, do you guys have yoga classes?

It feels so wrong.

Get the fuck out of here.

"Caca farol, here to get jerked!" Yeah. They did that in Ecuador. There was a city I was in when I did ayahuasca, and it was a guy from the tourism board, and he said, "What's gonna—" There's 3 cities that are like on the border to the Amazon. And you know, you could go in from any one of them. And they go, "What's gonna separate our city from all these other Amazonian cities?" And they go, "Let's be the ayahuasca city." Ooh. And everyone else on the tourism board said no. We are not getting a bunch of fucking hippie backpackers in here to be drug addicts in our town. Like, that's not what we're looking for at all. Here. This thing sucks. Yeah, it did. You just filled it up.

I'm not.

There's a lever on it too. I don't know. And he goes, okay, fair. But he goes, can I take you on an ayahuasca trip? Each member. And each member was like, you know, they're half indigenous. They're like, sure. Right. And then one by one, they all go, oh, this isn't an addictive thing. Right. So I had the wrong idea in my head of what this was. You come once, you don't come back for a year. Yeah.

Everybody had that thing from the Nixon administration.

Mm-hmm.

It's the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. And that thing, that's— it's really nuts. But for 56 years, we've been living underneath that.

It just becomes a given. Uh-huh. Yeah. You don't think to reevaluate any knowledge that's in there already. I know.

And it's like so many people, just a little microdose of shrooms, it'll change your fucking life. It would help so many people. There's so many people that are stressed out for no fucking reason.

It really does give you such a reset. 100%. And Molly too, I know that's why I talk to you, the MDMA, the MAPS people are always like, please start calling it MDMA. When you call it Molly, it becomes a party drug. I'm like, well, I do it at parties, so that's what it is for me.

The problem with what they're saying by saying that is like, no, because it is a party drug too. It is, yeah. It's also just like, what are we gonna call whiskey? We're gonna call it, you know, alcohol by volume? Are you gonna have a technical term for what whiskey is? Fuck off. It's whiskey. You know what I mean? Like, that's why people like it.

Like, you call it that if you want.

Yeah, you do whatever you want. I'm gonna call it Molly. Fuck off. Fuck off. I don't know about you guys, but with spring here, I am ready to go outside. There's so much to do now that things are warming up, like getting your garden ready for the growing season, cleaning off your camping gear, or even taking a quick jaunt around the neighborhood. Anything long to get outside, but that also means you're probably extra busy this time of year. That's where AG1 comes in, a healthy daily drink that helps support you all day long. One scoop of AG1 supports immune health, energy, digestion, and more. Plus, AG1 can replace all those multivitamins and probiotics crowding up your cabinet. See for yourself how making AG1 a part of your routine can help you stay on top of everything going on this season. Visit drinkag1.com/jorogan and for a limited time, get a bottle of omega-3, vitamin D3, K2, and an AG1 flavor sampler for free in your welcome kit with your first subscription. That's a $111 value at drinkag1.com/jorogan. Fuck off with all your rules.

That's a good ringtone.

But it's because they've spent so much money and so much time and so much effort trying to get this stuff passed through.

It would be so huge if you could just go get some mushrooms. Oh, it'd be so huge.

And why can't you if you can go to Costco and just buy a jug of whiskey and drink yourself to death?

It also— so like in Edinburgh, they have a season for it, and you can go through the meadows or any of these fields and just like pick mushrooms. Right. But if it's on your shoe, it's fine. And if it comes off your shoe, then it's illegal. Oh, that's hilarious.

But it's just like growing there. You know where Duncan used to live in Asheville? They started giving the cows like a certain type of feed that had antifungal properties to it. What? So that they wouldn't grow. So who knows what it did to the cow's gut? You know, probably ruined the cows. Just because so many kids were picking mushrooms off of the cow shit. Hey, we gotta put a stop to this.

In Thailand, it's the elephant shit. And the guys who ran the elephant like abusive centers, whatever, so you could ride them and make them play harmonica. Stuff that's natural in the wild. Oh no, oh no, guys, elephants love painting you a picture. We rode them when we were in Thailand. Me too. It's okay. Then I went back my second time and they were, everyone at the hostel was doing that. And then I was like, no, I already did it. And they go, humane or non-humane? I'm like, oh, definitely the humane one. They're like, did you ride them? That's inhumane. I'm like, oh yeah, inhumane then.

Well, the elephants wanted you to ride them. They don't mind, like, cause you weigh nothing and you feed them first and you make, you give them an offering. Right, so you, first of all, you wash them and you feed them. So you feed them, like you give them sugarcane and you have to develop a relationship with the elephant before you ride it. Like these people were all, they were all free-range elephants. They're all rescue elephants. So the elephants would come in out of the jungle. They weren't in cages. Oh really? Oh yeah, it was wild.

And they let you get a saddle on them? Uh-huh.

Well, you don't, it's barely a saddle. You just kind of climb onto them. And there's like a thing that you hold on to, and they're totally cool with it. And then the end, you go to this like pond and you wash them. And so it's like they could kill you anytime they want to, you know. So it's like, it's a relationship, and it's not— they're not prisoners, and they're not abused at all. The people that are running this, the place that I went to— but even then, I did a video with it, and I said, you know, I— you could ride them. I go, I rode them. I don't recommend it. I don't think you should do it. I would never do it again. I would never ride them again because it just feels fucked up. I would rather just feed them and pet at them and say, you're nice, but I don't need to go to the jungle.

Yeah, but also like you rode them. I did. So like if you hadn't rode them, you'd be like, I've never ridden an elephant.

I wouldn't have done it at all if my family didn't want to do it. They wanted to do it. So I said, okay, let's go. And they enjoyed it. It was a good experience. You know, the kids are, they're little and we're taking them to Thailand. And yeah, it's wild.

I wonder sometimes if these kids, I was talking to Tommy about it, like, if they'll know later in life how cool their experience was. Like, it'll be till like they're 35 or 40, they'll be like, oh yeah, I had a great time, I didn't understand the cool things I did.

Yeah, I think my kids are pretty aware of it.

Um, but anyway, they had these, these hippies would go over the encampment and pick out mushrooms from elephant patties. Oh, and then eventually the people, the herders, were like, why do these fucking dreadlock people keep coming in at night and like sniffing around our shit. And then they realized what it was and they go, oh no, no, we'll sell this.

Oh, so they sell it? Is it illegal in Thailand? Like, what is the legality of mushrooms?

Now I don't know because I think they just legalized weed in Thailand. Did they really? Yeah, but it— back then when it was illegal, there were bars that sold you joints and those are the bars that paid the cops. And so for all intents and purposes, you're fine, bro.

I would not fuck around with drugs in another country. Lame. Yeah, me. That's me. Yeah, super lame. I mean, talk to Brittney Griner. How'd that work out? Not good. Do you think when she was in jail, the guards would fuck with her and show videos of her missing? Like, how come you miss? How come you missed this shot? Breakdowns. You eat too much pussy. You smoke too much weed. You missed this shot. She was in jail for a long fucking time.

She was in jail for a while.

I think she was in jail for like Wasn't it like 6 months or something like that?

I knew someone who worked at the agency she was at, the sports management agency. Mm-hmm. Every day they started with 15 minutes of like, hey, before we get into anyone else's business, how are we getting her out?

10 months. Almost a fucking year in jail in Russia.

That's crazy for a rape charge. 9 years in a penal colony. Oh! That was a fun one because they just told America like, hey guys, keep quiet, we can get her out, she's a nothing. Asset. Just everyone be quiet. And the liberal angry, you know, housewives like, no, I want to say something. And they all just kept talking. And eventually he's like, Russia's like, oh, is this an important one? Oh really? Oh, we'll keep her in. Is that what happened? Yeah, I think so. I think it was Biden was like, just shut up. We'll get her out to shut up.

And they made it into a bigger thing so that they could get the merchant of death released.

We are the worst at hand. Americans are so bad at handling things they don't know how to handle. They just rush in full bore going, "I know how to fix it," with no knowledge of it.

Well, it's also once a story gets out in any form, influencers cannot help talk about it. They can't help it. It's their currency. There's no way they're not going to talk about it.

Same as all the late night guys. They knew after Trump won that like talking about him helps him. Before we said we're trying to take him down, but now we've seen the research. We know it's helping him. I'm still gonna do it 'cause it's my money. Yeah. People get rich. They can't help it.

Yeah. They can't help it. Yeah, I mean, that's like CNN's— most of their ratings were talking shit about Trump. Like, every time he did something outrageous, they would, they would talk shit about him and they would have him on, and it just made him more and more popular. Because I don't think they understood how much America's— Americans despised them. You know, they thought, we're CNN, we are the news, we're CNN. And then because the fact that Trump was opposed to them and they were— they just kept showing him they're like, oh, he must be good because you guys suck, right?

You ever hear the theory that terrorism and the US are symbiotic? What's the theory? How's it work? Terrorism can't exist without the US dominating their countries. Oh yeah, that makes sense. And the US, they can't keep funneling money to weapons without terrorists. Well, US and Israel. I mean, that's the thing. Sure, sure, sure.

But it's like— and Netanyahu, he famously said they were funding Hamas. We need them. We, we, we, when we fund Hamas, we can control the height of the flame.

For 9/11, like, yeah, it popped off a little high, but there was like, we need something to be like, hey, we're all against that. Mm-hmm. And then that, those countries like, look, they're all against us. So they just like, they need each other to keep growing.

Well, it makes sense. And also you need an enemy in order to get higher military contracts and higher budgets. I mean, if you don't have terrorism, how can you justify a trillion-dollar military?

So you need to like say, hey, they're a real threat. Like, that's a 30-person group. Yeah, they're not coming for us, but like, we got to take them down. Look at the training they're doing. You ever see Shane's bit? Monkey bars. They're on monkey bars doing their training. I love that bit.

Yeah, I love that bit about how bad they are at jumping jacks.

That's what fat people do to get in shape in The Biggest Loser.

Yeah, and they're stuck over there. Like, shut up. Yeah, they're not going over there. It's— and then I always wondered why we left behind all the shit. Like, cynically, I'm like, do we leave that stuff behind so that they could use it?

The older I get, the less I think there's accidents. There's ineptitude for sure, but there's also like, we've done the research, we know. Yeah. At some point, you know, there's bad moves you make here or there, but—

I mean, we left behind tanks and Black Hawk helicopters. Like, what, we couldn't get those out? We had to leave right now? We were there for 20 years, all of a sudden we got to get out right away?

You don't want to put a grenade in each one first? First before you go? Like, what do you mean? And also, those are still good. Yeah, we didn't get out like Vietnam.

Park them in a field and drop a fucking bomb on it. Yeah, you don't have to leave it there for the enemy. It's for the Taliban so they can keep the people under their thumb.

Yeah, if you retreated last second, I could see it, but it wasn't that.

And then you're like, yeah, they didn't have to leave when they— the way they left was insane. When you see those Those ships that are— the planes that are flying away and people are hanging on to the wheels of the plane and falling off because they don't want to be left behind. Because I know so many people that work with the Americans.

You said you'd protect us over and over again, and then you're like, yeah, we've done this over and over again. We'll just say exactly—

this is that we— it was equipment we gave to the Afghan state, so it wasn't, you know, it wasn't US equipment any longer.

And it's already given over to them.

We gave it to the Afghan state, but not the Taliban, the National Defense and Security Forces. Right. And then it— there was not that many of them. And so the moment that we left, the Taliban just took everything.

There's also like, I guess, what is the Taliban? We have this word on it. It's like an evil word, but are they just like the government in a lot of these places? Like the cartels in, in Colombia, they like build schools. They do bad shit, but they also are the government. They make sure the businesses run okay. And so you have this idea cartel, it sounds like that, but it's like, it's more than that. I wonder how much of the Taliban is actually into terrorism and how much is like just running day-to-day stuff.

Well, that's a good point because in America, I mean, what are the pharmaceutical drug companies? I mean, how many people have— we talked about this the other day. It's like 70,000 people died of opioid overdoses in America in 2024. 70,000. 70,000. So like, and a lot of that is probably cartel fentanyl, but a lot of it is like flat out old school oxycodone. So it's like, what are they?

What are they How much are they donating to 9/11 campaigns every year? Right. But they thought— you saw the most effective thing of that Sackler with Ferris Bueller, that documentary series, whatever. Yeah. Painkiller. Is they started every episode with a real person talking about how their son is dead. Yeah. Or, you know, something like that. Yeah. And then they can— you're like, oh my God, this makes it so real. Yeah. Painkiller. That's what it's called. Yeah. It was so good.

That's Peter Berg's. Yeah. We talked about that the other day. It's an amazing series. Amazing series. Like that, that— yeah, Matthew Broderick plays such a good fucking creep. He did such a good job. God, that fucking— that show's so disturbing because it's based on true story.

And he showed a guy falling into the despair from being fine. Yeah, to just like—

oh, do we all know somebody who got hooked?

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's so potent, it's so powerful. And they told doctors, they told people, they told everybody that wasn't even addictive. They knew it was addictive. They knew it operated on the same path— I mean, that's in the Painkiller series. Yeah, that it operates on the same pathway as heroin. Like, you're saying that this is not addictive? This is a lie.

Yeah, what they did there was go— if that movie is completely accurate, it's like, okay, so this is for heavily cancerous, like, bedridden people that have a pain threshold of 8 to 10. Like, it'll be good for them. Why don't we just extend the pain threshold to 3 to 10? Yeah, and that allows a lot more people in. If you're at a 9, it doesn't matter if I get addicted, my life is awful right now, right? If you're at a 3, like, walk it off.

Exactly. I talked about when I got my nose fixed, when the doctor tried to give me 2 different opiates, and I was like, why? It was nothing. I mean, it didn't even hurt. It was just mildly uncomfortable, and that was also because it was stuffed up with gauze. Like, those wasn't even gauze, like these foam things with a tube that they stuff in your nose to keep your nostrils open while it's healing. But, you know, he gave me two different opiates, and I was like, is it gonna get worse than this? Because I don't—

I'm fine. Fine. Yeah, they don't tell you, but be careful, I would not take unless you absolutely need it.

No, they don't tell you any of that. They want you to do it because they're financially incentivized.

I got a wisdom tooth out, and the dentist was like— I was like, hey, I don't want to like—

Why'd you get a wisdom tooth out?

Did it hurt? I don't remember. It was so long ago. Yeah, like 15, 18 years ago. What's the logic on that?

Are you supposed to get wisdom teeth taken out?

I've had both out.

Because I've had people say, I've heard people say you shouldn't. Like there's no reason to take them out.

Why do you, that they get impacted or something? I don't know.

Often they grow in, they're growing in wrong and they cause problems with other teeth. It had to be that.

But he gave me this thing of Vicodin and I was like, I don't want to. And he goes, you're friends with comedians, right? And I was like, yeah. He goes, your friends will want it. Whatever you don't need. What the fuck? Whatever you don't need, I'm sure you can find. He was joking around, but he was right. I have tons of addict friends. They are all like, nice. Yeah. Advising me to take aspirin, not use up one of those precious Vicodins.

I took that stuff once when I had my first ACL reconstruction, and it was— it made me so stupid. Vicodin? I think it was Vicodin. It was either Vicodin or Percocet. I can't remember, but I think it was Vicodin. But I wound up selling it at the pool hall.

Yeah. Sell it. Get some money. Yeah. Yeah. Do the right thing. The only time I would advise taking Vicodin is if you have like 2 beers. And really want a good night. Really? Oh yeah, those go so well with liquor.

Is Vicodin an opiate? Is it the same thing as oxycodone? Like, what is Vicodin?

It's a downer. I don't know what ox does.

You're a downer. It's a— yeah, it combines hydrocodone and Tylenol.

Oh, Tylenol. Tylenol and hydrocodone. Well, nice one, Joe.

A lot of people die from that shit too.

Tylenol. Yeah, I was reading this sad story once about this lady who— she had COVID and she was in so much pain from COVID that she kept taking Tylenol and she died of a fucking liver failure because the Tylenol, the acetaminophen, killed her liver.

Sometimes you see people dying, you're like, what a loser way to die. You can't ever tell anybody, there's no victimhood. Aspirin overdose, dork. That's crazy.

How much aspirin do you have to take before you die? That seems nuts.

I feel like all these middle school girls would try it before they had access to stuff. Really? When they just want to be drama queens, like, I took a whole bottle of aspirin.

Oh yeah. Oh, I knew a girl did exactly that thing. Exactly that. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, she took aspirin, but it's like, that's not gonna do it. But your call for attention is there.

She was also crazy annoying.

You're like, let me tell you how she do it.

Big tits and she fucked everybody. She was nuts. And I'll accept it. This girl was a fucking freak. She fucked everybody. She was an animal. Catholic schoolgirl.

I just came across something weird. What? Uh, I just typed in Tylenol deaths and this thing came up. The Chicago Tylenol murders. Ooh. It seems like it's an unsolved case. Drug tampering. Yeah, there was tampered Tylenol that people bought that was potassium cyanide. 7 people died.

Yeah, they broke— that's when they started doing the seal on top. Yeah. Yeah, right?

I remember this. I remember this. This is when I was in high school. Do they know why?

Uh, that is— investigation suspects.

I wonder what the conspiracy— Yeah, what's the tinfoil hat?

Someone recently was arrested. No suspect has been charged as of 2026. Whoa!

So a bunch of people died and they just got away with it. Yeah. Wow.

Someone was convicted of extortion, sending a letter to Tylenol manufacturer claiming responsibility. Responsibility in demanding a million dollars.

If I remember right, they said, they said, we found out the problem with one plant that had whatever, and we've, we've got— and someone else like, well, okay, I bought this bottle before that happened, so this should be safe. And then it wasn't. And then it was like Tylenol or whatever was like covering up how bad it got instead of going recall everything.

Estimated 31 million bottles were in circulation with a retail value of over $100 million. Equivalent to $334 million in 2025. The company also advertised in the national media for individuals not to consume any of its products that contained acetaminophen after it was determined that only these capsules had been tampered with. Wow.

Other ones in California that strict 9 in them.

Wow. So that's probably one of those things too. There's copycats, right? Like one person hears about someone buying poison Tylenol. I want to do that. Yeah, I want to poison people in Ohio. I want to poison—

yeah, fucking hacks. Get your own shit. Fucking hacks. Just be original. Be awful, evil, but be original. There's so many of those, like the Tylenol, where like, wait, were you guys evilly covering this up and resulting in more deaths? That I found out down there was like Coca-Cola, Dole. We're like, oh, these are like evil corporations. As soon as they realize that they're—

you know the Pinto story? Uh-uh. The mistake. So Ford found out —let's, let's— oh yeah, research this to make sure this is true. Someone brought it up on the podcast. They're blowing up and they realize it's cheaper to just pay people off that died from their car being blown up than it is to recall all these Ford Pintos. Because the Pinto had like the gas station— the gas tank rather was in the back. Yeah, something— there was something about the design where if you got rear-ended, it would blow up.

And it was just— they did a dollar value on it.

Yeah, somebody did. I want to say Ford. I want to, you know, you say Ford, but really it's a person. It's, it's not the Ford of today. It's some guy. Would that be a pre-production crash test? Yeah. Investigators and lawsuits showed that pre-production crash tests had already revealed this vulnerability, but the car still went to market largely unchanged. Yeah. Who told us about this?

I'll check. I kind of remember that.

It's one of our guests explained that to us and it was just like, oh, Oh God, it's so dark. It's such a fucking dark, evil thing to do, to say, well, people are gonna die, but we'll just pay them off.

The number—

yeah, what is the number? First of all, the car sucked. Why'd you make it in the first place? It's a terrible, ugly shoe.

Fuck it, kind of looks cool now, but no, it doesn't. It's got that sun deck in the back. Garbage car. So Coca-Cola would have people just like— if you were like a leftist plant leader running for whatever, they were worried that if that person got in power, they would unionize their population and that would cost them more money in the plants. And they would just have people straight killed, straight up, get them out of the way. Had people whacked. Dole used to be the American Fruit Company.

Coke and a Smile, they had people whacked.

I mean, look it up.

But like, see, when you start looking at Coke, it's probably an executive somewhere, probably an executive. They didn't draw house of cards style, who had some guy who was a fixer for him, right? And he's like, look, these motherfuckers are causing problems. And this guy was concerned with his job as whatever, CEO, executive.

But it's happened over a long period of time. They were giving money to, I think, FARC or something in Colombia after they were already labeled like a terrorist organization. They're still giving them money.

For decades, Coca-Cola has faced several severe allegations regarding the murder and intimidation of union leaders. At bottling plants in Colombia and Guatemala.

They hired paramilitary death squads to suppress labor activism. That's like, oh, what, they want an honest, like, day's pay? Get rid of him.

You know, do you remember when Ross Perot was running for president? You were too young.

I barely remember, but sort of.

I was just starting to be aware of how fucked up politics were, and because he was on television explaining about the World Trade Organization, about when they were going to start opening up plants in Mexico and moving jobs to Mexico. He's like, "What you're gonna hear is a giant sucking sound where all the money and jobs are gonna go down to Mexico." And what we allowed during that time was essentially what the labor unions were doing in this country, was making sure that people had a great wage because the corporations were getting paid well. So the CEOs wanted all the money like they always do. The corporation wanted all the money, but you really can't make a Mustang unless you have the people that are on the assembly line, unless you have the people that are doing all the hard labor and all the work, and they should get compensated correctly. And so the auto— auto unions workers organized it, and they went on strike, and they did what they had to do, and they were making a great living. They were making a great living, and these people had a nice house, and they had a car and a garage, and it felt good that they were getting paid really well.

And so a lot of people thought, well, they're getting paid too well, and this is fucking up our profits. Wow. And so what— and I'm simplifying this, if you're a historian—

take $10 from million people instead of let the top guys make a million less.

So what they did is just open up a plant in Mexico and pay people fucking slave labor And they go over there and they pay them slave wages. And these people are making cars for like fucking how much, a dollar a day or something like that, instead of getting healthcare and retirement. And you know, and so that's what we're talking about.

The free market says go to Mexico. The moral market says no, no, no, no, no. Hold on, let's just pay people what they deserve here.

But it's not just that, but they destroyed Detroit. That's right. That's Roger and Me, that documentary. Michael Moore's greatest documentary is all— his first one is his best one. One. Yeah, because it's really documenting a horrific attack on Detroit and, and Flint, Michigan, and all those places up there where there's all these auto plants, and they all just went away, man. And those jobs went away, and now Detroit is— Detroit's kind of bouncing back.

It's coming back. Danny was talking about it, Brown, where he was like, just before COVID it was like starting to be like some cool new restaurants and like really coming back. Then COVID kind of nailed it down again, and now it's, I think, back, back back, going back up again.

They have some cool stuff in there. I mean, there's a bunch of companies that are like proudly like made in Detroit. Underrated pizza.

Detroit pizza. Oh, really? Square. Yeah, it's really good. Square. Interesting. Yeah. Crispy like on every bite and every slice. Oh, okay. Because it's not thick crust square. It's like that thin crust square. It's just really good.

Isn't it funny that we want it in a circle? I want it in a circle. Why? I don't know. Odd. It's weird. You get committed to it. It's like, we don't get committed to that with a sandwich. Like, if I go to a Jewish deli and I get a square sandwich, I don't say, no, I want it to look like a hoagie. I want it to look like a submarine. Doesn't look right. Right. You know, like, no one cares. No one cares the shape. No, it's a really good sandwich. But some people do. Like, if you give them a cheeseburger, but it's on bread, they're like, what is this bullshit? Square bullshit. I want a round bun, motherfucker. On rye bread. Like, what is this? Rye bread is for pastrami. Give me rye bread with a fucking cheeseburger, you communist. Is my name Reuben?

Then why you give me something that looks like a fucking Reuben? Yeah, what is this?

Like if you buy an Italian sandwich, it has to come on a big old fucking hoagie roll. A ciabatta. You know, one of those big fucking seeded. Yeah, that's what you want. All bread. It's weird that we want our pizza to only be circular.

And then what's weird too is you're not eating it in the round version. Right. You're eating it in this weird triangle.

Right. You're eating just an edge of round.

That edge could be—

you know what I've seen that deeply disturbs me? Oh no. When people take a circular pizza and then they chop it up into a bunch of squares. I'm like, what have you done?

No, that's the Ohio style.

Is that what it is? Really?

That's what it's called?

Or pub style.

Oh, okay. So you split it up a little.

Yeah. That makes kind of sense, but not for—

you bring one pizza into the bar and now fucking 10 people can get a bite as opposed to—

I guess the only other way to make slices like that thin thin, like real thin, like long, but that's not fun.

We also have edge-to-edge toppings. How many pizzas has Dave Portnoy sold? If you really stop and think about it, Dave Portnoy is probably responsible for more pizza sales in this country than any other living human being. Yeah, probably. Yeah, because I watch his pizza reviews.

I want to go get a pizza. He gives it to you honest.

Yeah. Oh, he's very good at it. Yeah. I mean, he really loves pizza too. Like you could tell like this is a, He's not making any money off of that. No, he's really not.

No, just like some views.

It's a labor of love. He likes it. It's fun for him and it's become a thing. And he gets in arguments with pizza places sometimes. Like they yell at him. He yells at them.

You can't film in here.

They throw shit at him. It's like really kind of crazy.

That's so great.

But I've gone to places because he recommended them. Like if I find out that I'm in a town and I know that there's pizza there, I'm like, what does Portnoy think?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want a local rec. It's always better.

No one's done that with anything else. Like, what other celebrity has done that with any other kind of food where they go places and review it?

There's a guy in New York, not a celebrity, but he was— his goal was to search out every single slice in New York. It took him years and then named the best ones.

Boy, how would you know? How are you gonna compare a slice to a slice you had a year ago?

It's right. I guess you got it right. Yeah, you really gotta know.

How are you gonna know?

You can instantly go no, but yeah, anything that's good, you got to go back and forth. Plus it's super subjective, obviously. Yeah, you got to go cheese. No, you got to prepare cheese to cheese, right? It has to be just plain cheese pizza, which is a classic. It's so good.

I mean, other pizzas are great, but man, a really good plain cheese pizza is fucking phenomenal. Yeah, especially if it's done well.

Fresh out. Here's the secret too. If you're in New York, underrated tip. I told Ruddy this. He's going to New York. Fat guy. So he's going to want to like get some tips. I was like, no matter what you were going to get, just say, do you have anything fresh coming out? And they say, it's going to be like 10 more minutes. So it's okay. I'll wait. That's what you want.

It's like when you go to Krispy Kreme and they got the serve, the hot donuts, they're coming out hot. Yeah. The lights on. With that lights on. If I'm thinking about having it, when I used to live in LA, there was a Krispy Kreme down the street. Like it was on the way home. And if I drive by, if Fucking hot. The hot light was on. I'm like, I'm pulling. Yeah, I'm getting a hot one.

So much better than warmed up.

It's so much better. Like when they come right out and the glazed ones that are coming right out hot, the plain, they just dissolve in your mouth. Oh yeah, right there. Oh, and good for you. Oh yeah, it's better than, better than vitamins. Look at that. It cures diabetes.

You have all dough and you're like, let's put some— with sugar in it, like, let's put some sugar on top.

Let's fully overwhelm your system. I remember I would eat them, then I'd go back to my house and I'd go, what was— what's wrong with you? What's— why did you do this? The fuck is wrong with you?

We've all been there. You fucking idiot. What's wrong with you?

You feel so bad. Because I would eat like half a dozen too. I'd eat like 6 donuts. I'd get, uh, I'd always buy like a box and I'd eat half the box. I'd buy like a box of a dozen and I'd buy like Chocolate cream filled and all the different ones. And I eat like 6 of them in my car on my way home. And then I'd get home and I'm like, oh, hurting.

Just poison. An adult has learned nothing about his body.

39 years old. Sitting on the couch. Oh.

When you have that after 23 years old, you're like, you're hurting. You're like, I just have to let this pass. I have to just like for an hour. Like, what a fucking loser. You're a fucking loser. Yeah, you ate yourself into feeling bad. I do that all the time. Drinking, I get, sneaks up on you. I eat when—

if I go to New York, every time I go to New York, I eat myself into a coma. I eat myself way too— gotta— just way too fat. I get hurting, like where my stomach stretched out so much it hurts because I've got so much food in there. I really can't fit any more food, and I look pregnant. My stomach sticks out. You got a beer belly. Oh, it looks so awful, and it's all swollen and bloated because it's all the pasta and bread. It's all the water and the wine. It's making it expand.

Can't even think straight. Your body's like, bring everything into the stomach right now.

Yeah, you have no— like, if I had to pass a spelling bee, I'm fucked. My IQ dips by like 40 points. Yeah, it's terrible. I'm a glutton too. I'm a— I have a real problem with like volume. I just— when I start eating, I'm like a dog. I just keep eating. I just can't stop. Like, I'm good at not eating. Like, I cannot eat for like 12, 16 hours. But when I sit down for a meal, I just— or when I'm ordering, I think it comes from being poor when I was a kid too. So it's like there's something about like wanting everything. I want it all. I want steak, I want pasta, I want this, I want that, I want that. And then after, like, you never learn, you fucking idiot.

Yeah, and you're like, you're like, I've had about enough, and then you're like like one more bite, and then you're like, and now if we're talking, like, I'm gonna eat like two more full plates worth as we're talking.

I remember we were in Atlanta once. This has happened more than once, but this one lady in Atlanta was like almost arguing with me. Too much food. Yeah, we went to a diner in Atlanta after our show, and this— I ordered two things. I ordered like meatloaf and I ordered a steak, and she's like, oh honey, that's too much food. I go, no, it's not. I go, I'm gonna eat it all. And she's like, that is too much food. I go, you don't know, you don't know me. You don't know you. You don't know me. I can consume. I will consume all of This is not a problem.

I need this. Yeah, when it's time for you to eat, you eat.

Especially also after shows, dude. Oh God, you do fucking long-ass shows.

I brought you and Goldie once a hot dog. I was just like, there was, I was doing the early days of yours. Not early, but like mid-level days and then high-level days. So I remember having more access than anyone could really get anymore. Oh yeah, you were behind me in the—

I remember the time when the camera was on you and Duncan, so you guys made out.

We were bored. They timed it. So we noticed, we noticed the camera was sitting right behind you.

So the way they could see the monitor, so they were sitting behind me, so they knew what the camera was capturing. So we're on that camera, that guy's camera. They waited, and then he's got it right here, and in the middle, as soon as the camera's on, you guys just— Frosty died. Oh my God. This is the early, early days. This is probably like 2002 or something like that. That was way back in the day.

First, so first we're giving out a— so Duck was being accused of being an Illuminati a lot then. So he goes, oh, there's a camera on me. I got to do this thing. He goes, what? He goes, it's just to stoke the flame. So he'll just do this. He'll do triangles. At some point we made a big triangle with both our hands. And then I think he said it. I don't know. It doesn't matter. One of us said it. The other reacted. He goes, hey, next time we gotta kiss. And I was like, fuck yes. I'm pretty sure it was Duncan. Goddammit, yeah, you're right, we do. And I was like, this is gonna be awful, but you have to.

I didn't know about it until after it was over. People were like, your friends were kissing on camera. And I just, I literally couldn't breathe. I was like, oh my God, oh my God. I go, show it to me, show it to me. I like made the guys in the truck show me the video of it. I'm like, oh my God, this is so funny.

There was also like a wrestling moment, or it was, there was a lot of wrestling in that fight if I remember right. It's a long time ago, but there was a blog saying from like an MMA blog, it's like two bored bearded dudes make out during a UFC fight. Dude, you give a comic a camera on you and we're like, let's go.

We gotta do something. Especially like you have 6 hours, 6 hours of fighting. Fights, so there's all this time to think. And they're not all exciting. No, some of them are fucking boring. And when they're boring, you gotta come up with different ways to entertain yourself. Yeah, what you gonna do?

Yeah, it was so fun. You could see the one that was on it. So like, when those fighters are in front of us— this guy, I'm gonna fix this.

Like, it wants to work.

It wants to work. I wonder if this one works.

Those are fun times. That was back when the UFC was like, no one was watching anyway.

You could just do whatever you want. The weigh-ins was the best. We had a weigh-in in Florida and it was just like only the camps kind of came in. Mm-hmm. And the Tapout guys, rest in peace, they'd come in there. Well, just one rest in peace. Yeah. Live well. Um, but it was just like you'd be in there and I remember once you were like like, hey, Ari, maybe I'll call you up to weigh in. And you could, you just could. And be like, you want to go now? All right. It was like, there was no real rules then. It was pretty wild.

No one knew what was going on. Ari Shaffir. And you would just walk out. Yeah, you could do anything back then. And that was also a real weigh-in. That was when the guys actually would get on the scale. Now it's a ceremonial weigh-in. Oh, really? Yeah, because now they weigh in in advance because they want to give them more time to recover. Oh, right. The whole thing's gross. They shouldn't be weighing in, and they shouldn't be cutting weight.

As a casual fan, it's the most obvious one. Make them weigh in at the event.

It's crazy. I mean, we've had long discussions. I had a discussion recently with Hunter Campbell where we're trying to figure out a way to blow up all the weight classes and make people fight at what their actual weight is.

But you'd have to like show up in camp, like, you know, get to the right, exact right weight, weigh them a pound or two below for safety. 50.

But it would have to be random. Like, they couldn't know you were coming.

Oh, like the whole way through it has to be at that weight? Just show up. What do you weigh?

Get on the scale. 185, bro. You're supposed to be fighting at 155. How the fuck are you 185?

It's dumb because you're not actually— you're, you're— it's like having field goals decide like an NFL game. It's like, this is not— this is like a minor part of the sport, right? So that's like you're having a 185er fighting against a 160-pound. So you're not actually Well, they're saying who's best in your class.

In the elite levels, they're all doing it. So it's everybody's cheating. It's sanctioned cheating.

It's not cheating because it's legal, but it's rewarding guys who know how to cut better than guys who don't. And as a casual fan, that's not what we're into. It's also very biological.

So some people can cut weight very easily, and some people it's a fucking grind. And it's way more of a grind for women. Women hold on to that water weight a lot harder than men do. Do. So when a woman has to lose, like a woman has to cut like 20 pounds, it's— yeah, man, they cut weight, but apparently it's way more brutal for them.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's fucking terrible. They should— they should— it should have never been in there in the first place, and they should figure out a way to get it out.

What do they do in high school wrestling when people fight at like 112? That's just your weight, or do you cut weight?

You weigh in the day, the weigh-in the day of, but it's still— you're still cutting weight. I weighed— I used to wrestle at 128, and then I wrestled at—

128 for a grown man? I mean, high school—

oh. And then 134, and then I— because I couldn't really make 128 anymore. And then when I started fighting in taekwondo, I fought— my first fights were at 140. That was when I was like 15, 16. And then by my last fight at 140, I was 17, and I was not 140. And I was starving myself, and I was cutting a bunch of water weight, and then I would fight dehydrated. But I only did it one year. I only did it one year and then I went up to 155, which was much better. That was easy because I didn't have to cut any weight and I was way better then. But that thing where they do in wrestling, you're not getting hit in the head in wrestling, right? So it will deplete you. And so you have to make a decision, like, muscles— how much am I gonna be depleted and want to be the size bully and have a bigger frame and utilize it but have depleted performance? Like, how much how good a shape would I have to be in where that depletion only takes out a certain percentage of my ability? And so it's like this calculated thing.

Like Kurt Angle, for instance. Kurt Angle, when he was Olympic gold medalist, he didn't cut any weight, and he was a phenomenal wrestler. Kurt Angle was a fucking monster, and he was beating guys way bigger than him, but he had so much energy because he didn't cut weight. And so he was wrestling against guys that did cut weight, and he was dominating them.

Yeah, because he was full strength. They were bigger than him.

They were bigger than him, but he had incredible skill, also strong as fuck anyway, and had no depletion of his resources. Like, his body was working at full capacity.

It's like Greg Fitzsimmons in the prime. He would just fight anybody. He would just fight anybody. Oh, tiny little man, fight anybody.

He got attacked on stage at Stitches, and the guy got a rush, attacked him, and they fucking— some brawl broke out, and the bouncers got in, they take the guy away, and then Greg gets on the microphone. Didn't even end the show. Gets on the microphone, he goes, anybody else want some of this? It was great. He finished his set. Wow. He finished. He's great composure, kept it together, finished his set. Fucking fun dude. Wow. Yeah, but they should— they really should ban weight cutting. But the only way they're really ever gonna be able to do that is to make more weight classes. There's not enough weight classes.

And then you'll have the —what, I don't understand enough to talk about it.

I think boxing has 18 weight classes.

Yeah, don't you have like some like who cares weight classes?

Yeah, so there's sorta—

and if you really want to get known, you got to move up or down to one of the majors.

Well, you know what's weird? Like 160 is a huge weight class. 147, welterweight, huge weight class, big giant fights. Cruiserweight, which is like between light heavyweight and heavyweight, no one gives a fuck about. Wow, why? It's weird. It's just weird. Like, nobody gives a shit about the cruiserweight champion. Like, Usyk, before he became the heavyweight champion, was the cruiserweight champion, and people cared about him just because he was so skillful. But he had to go up to heavyweight before people cared. But if he was a light heavyweight, he would have been huge. Shame on— it's weird, very weird. But I think boxing— how many weight classes does boxing have, professional boxing? I want to say there's 18, whereas in the UFC there's only 8.

It's a big difference. It's a big difference. You can— and you can follow champions better.

Yeah, but it's also—

it's like when Mighty Mouse came in, it was like, you have this dominant guy coming in, uh-huh, to really launch the weight class, but people like, we don't know this weight class, so we're less interested in you than we should be.

Well, the people have a thing about tiny people. They look at a small guy who's like 5'3" and weighs 125 pounds and like, nah, we don't— 17 here.

17. Red Ben said the 135ers and 125ers, they should have to come into the octagon on little mini horses and ride around a couple times.

So rude. So what was also interesting is like flyweight women, Valentina Shevchenko, it's one of the premier weight classes in the women's division. That's heavy for a woman. It's like normal size. 125 is like a normal weight. It's like a man fighting at 160 160 or, you know, 170. It's normal.

Weird.

Yeah, it's weird. But there's not enough weight classes, and they should have fixed that a long time ago. There's, there's giant gaps, like the gap between 185, which is middleweight, and then 205, which is light heavyweight. That's crazy. Big one. It's a giant leap.

And then everything else—

well, not even. That's what's even stupider. Yeah, you get to heavyweight at 265. That's the cutoff for heavyweight. So you have to weigh 265 or under.

That's my favorite weigh-ins because they're still wearing their jeans, right? Like, they don't really— they're like, I'm inside a range.

Yeah, they don't give a fuck. But the, the— so ceremonial weigh-ins is what we have now. So when someone weighs in now, they've already weighed in in the morning in an official scale in front of, you know, doctors and state reps.

They give them a chance to come back.

The athletic commission checks them out, and so then they just suck a bunch of water down and electrolytes, and they slowly rehydrate over the 4-5 Yeah, they have to do it.

Science is so crazy behind it. Heavyweight division is older than the United States.

Wow. Officially, 1738. Whoa.

Weighing as much as they want. Whoa. So heavyweight was weight—

they weighed 160 plus since the division. 160 plus? Yeah, people were tiny back then.

Oh yeah.

You know, Rocky Marciano was like one of the great heavyweights of all time. Yeah, he weighed 185 pounds. So Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champ of the world, one of the greatest of all time, weighed 15 pounds less than me. Wow. Yeah, and then that's so different.

If you ever look back at a fat guy from like Chris Farley types or whatever, and you're like, you're not even— you're just a little big.

Yeah, it's like normal Steve Simone body. Look at these guys back then where they wore diapers and shit. Like, what's that? What are you wearing? What's that thing around your waist?

What is that? It's a wipe of blood.

And they all fought bare-knuckle back then too. Quick fights. Well, they just broke their hands a lot. They had a— they threw a lot of punches to the body back then because they didn't want to break their hands on people's heads.

That was the biggest defense back then, the Brian Dennehy thing. Yeah, and make a punch on the head and break it.

And they all boxed like this too, where they would throw their knuckles out like that. Wow. Because if you just blast someone, you could blast someone like that if you have gloves on and hand wraps.

Stockton slap would have gone a long way back then.

Oh yeah, they would have been legendary. Slapped him. Yeah, it's, uh, it's funny how things change and then how they go back to it, because now bare-knuckle boxing is making a huge comeback.

Yeah, see chess boxing?

Oh yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Beat the shit out of each other and then play chess. Play 5 minutes. If you're a good boxer, like, you have a massive advantage. The guy just got a concussion. He doesn't even know what the knight does.

He's like, uh, like, you can't move that. Like, ah, fuck.

I wonder whose idea that was. What kind of fucking psychopath?

Who wants to combine those things.

Yeah, you'd have to be people that aren't that good at boxing and aren't that good at chess, because if somebody flatlines you and sends you to the hospital, you're not playing chess afterwards. Yeah, so it has to be people that kind of suck at boxing, kind of suck at boxing, because if you really like Mike Tyson somebody, you fucking KO them and they have to get carried out in a stretcher, well then you by fault won, by default won the chess as well, because they can't even play.

Yeah, just dusty boards.

You have to take them to the hospital. How are they gonna play chess? I don't even understand the rules there.

You have to have a minimum of 1800 1800 in chess to be a competitor.

What is that? What's 1800?

I would imagine pretty good. Is that a score?

What does that mean?

The scores in chess, like a golf handicap?

Yeah, it's something like that.

Wow.

So what is like Magnus Carlsen, the guy that was on the podcast? What does he have?

What's his rating? Let's see, I just typed it. Plays poker too. Does he? You'd be in the top 5.

Super smart, dude. Yeah, super smart guy. He's one of those dudes you talk to him like— there's some guys you talk to him like, oh, there's a lot working on on behind those eyes. It's like if you were high around that guy, you'd probably get weirded out. You're an alien.

He's, uh, 2840. Wow, way better.

What is the highest ranked chess player alive?

Good question, Joe. Thank you.

That'd be him. Oh really? Yeah, he peaked at 2882, the highest in history. That's crazy.

That is crazy.

Wow. What about that schizo Jew turned Arab, whatever his name is. Which guy? Which guy? The fucking boy. The boy who went schizo.

Schizo Jew turned Arab? Yeah. Wasn't there some Bobby Fischer?

Bobby Fischer, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had to translate it. Oh yeah, he became like very anti-Semitic, right? I don't know.

Very close. 2785. So Magnus is better than him? Yeah, I mean, if Magnus is the best ever.

Yeah, Magnus ever. Okay, he's a fucking super genius. So what happened with Bobby Fischer?

This actually has him rated maybe one point below Magnus's peak, 2881, one-year performance. It says Bobby Fischer. Yeah, it's based off of like who you're playing, when you're playing them, and how old, like, you know, oh good, they're at the time.

And it's like golf, it's like who's in the tournament. Yeah.

Mm, yeah, but that happens, like pool has ratings, they have a Fargo rating, and they also do it per game —like, there's this guy, he just died recently, Chang Jung-lin, and he's this dude from Taiwan, and he played at 1,000. 1,000 was his—for one game. He couldn't get it. Not for one game, excuse me, for, like, one match.

What would he have to give to you or to me? Oh, it would be pointless.

He'd just destroy us. Just as soon as you—he never missed.

That means he played it—He'd be like, make a ball and you win.

There's another guy, this guy who's also from Taiwan, Ko Ping-chung, and he played an entire match where he never missed a ball. He won 11 to nothing against another world-class player who lost a coin flip to start. Yeah, he lost the lag, the lag.

And I think that's it, the guy didn't touch the cue.

He broke and left a long shot on the 1 ball, and the guy missed that, and he never made a ball. Not— he didn't make one ball the entire—

every— there was a winner goes first, winner goes first. There's a couple of those winter breaks.

So every time he broke, he— and he was making the one ball inside like every game. And every time he didn't have a shot, he would just play a lock-up safety, and the guy would kick and then leave a shot, and then he would run out again. He just— he got— just got in the zone. So he played at a 1,000 Fargo for the entire match. That's crazy. That means he never missed a ball on 4-inch pockets. Oh, really tiny little pockets.

There's people that are like— it's amazing how big pool is too across the world, and billiards too.

Oh yeah, and in Asia it's huge.

Asia's huge. Do you find people with just an overhang just so it doesn't get wet, and they're all out there playing and just like flip-flops?

And well, we're losing a lot of the top Taiwanese and Chinese players to a game that they play in China now where it's like a snooker table. It doesn't look like a pool table, like the pockets aren't cut the same way, they're rounded. But they're playing 9-ball and they're playing with like purses for like top, top purses, like $600,000 for a tournament, $700,000. Wow. So they're all going over there and playing in that because you can make millions in a year instead of a couple hundred grand, which is like what the best players make in America.

That's why women were going to fucking Russia to play basketball. All right. Until now. Until now. Well, just don't bring weed, you know. I mean, it's just, I mean, just don't bring weed.

The thing is like, but also I think they were all doing it. Basketball a lot, apparently. I'm not a basketball player, clearly.

But you couldn't keep score. Me and Muggsy Bogues.

Yeah, all right, that's a good reference. Yeah, yeah. But weed apparently is phenomenal for basketball players. Like, they all talk about it. Like, I've talked to basketball players about weed. They say, I can play way better when I'm high.

Well, they had the feel— collective bargaining, not a late one, but like 20 years ago, and they're like, we can test for drugs. But they fought back. They go, not weed. So if you get caught with weed, sure, you can suspend us, but you can't test for it because why? We're all doing it.

Yeah, they're all doing it and it helps the game. Like, it helps their, their feel. It helps pool for sure.

It helps poker for sure, for sure.

Oh, I'd imagine you read people's tells. Yeah. According to World Snooker Tour figures, more than 24.5 million unique viewers watched the third session of the final alone in China, and during the whole 2025 tournament, it had a cumulative audience of 180 million in national broadcast compared That's, that's like an NFL playoff.

24 million watched the finals of this. What's, what's— it's like a billion for Super Bowl, right? Yeah, but like a playoff game.

Yeah, but that's snooker, or like the English call it snooker. So snooker is very different, and it's on a 12-foot table. It's a huge table, and the balls are very small, and they don't have numbers on them. It's just like red and red, black, pink. It's mostly red. There's red that's in the stack, and then you have black, pink, brown, and I think there's another one. I've never played the game. I fucked around with it when I was in school. Scotland. They had a table and I was like shooting balls on it. It's interesting.

In Colombia, they all play this thing and it's 3-cushion billiards. Yeah. And it's the, they take their cue and move a thing over, like a scorer over, and they keep playing and move one over. Yeah. And they're all playing it and they're just kind of casual bars, but it's like 20 tables and they're everywhere.

And this is where there's no holes in the table, right? Yeah. That's called 3-cushion billiards.

I sit there and watch and drink.

It's a fun game. I don't know how to play it really well. I, you know, Well, it's really under— it is definitely strategy, but it's really understanding angles. It's understanding how to kick and how to like— but when I say kick, what I mean is like go off a rail and hit another rail and then collide with the ball. So 3-cushion billiards is you have 3 balls on the table, that's it. And so you have the whole table, it's like a big-ass pool table, but there's no pockets and you have 3 balls. And so what you have to do is hit one ball and then go 3 rails, at least 3 cushions, and then hit the second ball. Another ball. Yes. But also put yourself in a position where then you can make another shot afterwards, right? Or play safety. It's a complicated game and it's different because it's a lot of its spin. And the harder you hit it, the shorter the angle is. And if you hit it with English, it spins out wider or shorter depending upon what you're trying to do with with it. And it's a— but if you get good at it, it really will help your pool game because you'll really have a much more deep understanding of how the ball moves around the table with different speed and sidespin and all that kind of shit.

I've only fucked around with it though, and then not in a long time. We had a table at Executive Billiards in White Plains. We used to have a 1-3 cushion table they would fuck around on.

Just play for laughs? I couldn't do it.

I just— I want to see the balls go away. It's nice. I want to see— when I fire a ball in, I want to see it go down that hole. Bye-bye. I want to clear it out. I don't want balls lingering, just staring at me like, do it again, do it again, do it again, I'm still here, do it again.

It's funny that that became a bar sport. Mm-hmm. It's really just darts, and that became the sports at bars. Sure. And the table takes up a lot more space.

Than a dartboard.

Yeah, dartboard, sure, but that pool table, you need like some actual space.

Yeah, and that space is totally not usable other than that. It's— that's where it is, unless a girl's dancing on it. I went to it.

I went to a— there's this like pool hall slash like samba place in, in, in somewhere in Brazil. What? Pool and samba? Yeah, it's like daily, it's a pool hall, but then at night it turns into samba, and like the highest level guys come in their capo and their music Capitol. It's so fun, but these guys don't stop playing pool. And so everyone's dancing, it's so packed and crowded. Excuse me. And you're like, the etiquette is you just know when you're a bar, like, all right, all right. But you get, you want to be like, bro, not just, it's packed. You can't play pool here.

Yeah, you can't play pool there, but they were doing it. Well, there's a place in the Bronx that is this Dominican pool room where they gamble big money, big money, and they stream some of the matches on YouTube. YouTube, and it's fucking bananas because people are just talking constantly. They're yelling at each other in Spanish. Oh, wow.

You know, Dominican people are having fun. They're having fun.

There's all these Spanish-speaking, and they're yelling, and they're all very flamboyant and having a good time. And they get people to go over there and play like pros, and they get so rattled because the environment—

They're not used to that. Right. Wow.

Playing on his turf. Right. Not only that, but the guys can play, and they're accustomed to that culture. Culture. So they're accustomed to all the yelling and all the craziness and guys standing in front of the hole while you're shooting at it, which is a no-no in regular pool.

Oh, that's like high school. Yeah, do it then, do it.

They don't do it that bad. It's not that bad, but there's plenty of guys moving around the table. They're all talking, everyone's yelling. The tables next to you are yelling. They don't care if you're betting $30,000 on a set.

Dominicans are having so much fun, they're allowed to use the N-word. Blacks are like, you know what, they kind of rule, give it to them.

Just Dark enough. Let it go. But it's really interesting because I've watched guys who are like top pros go over there and fucking lose to guys that they're not supposed to lose to. And the reason why they're losing is because they're just rattled by the environment. Wow. And so what a lot of these guys will do, they'll put AirPods on. So they'll put AirPods in with the noise-canceling, so try to take away some of the fucking sound and just focus. But you're really going to be playing at like 60% of your capacity because there's just too much chaos going around. If you play in a real legit pool tournament, everything's dead quiet while the guy's down on the ball, and then they clap when someone makes the ball. Well, then he moves to the next shot, they stop clapping.

Yeah, too respectful.

Yes. Yeah, but not these fucking pool— and these guys are playing for big money. They're playing for tens of thousands of dollars, and they're just getting sharked and rattled, stealing their blood. I watch guys like— I watch this guy Oscar Dominguez play. This dude Oscar's a top pro. He's on the Mosconi Cup. Cup. He was on the Mosconi team for the US, and he was over there playing this dude. I was like, how did they get him to go there?

Wow. I'm talking about rep too. It's like the guys who do, um, Burning Man, the DJs, like, I'll play for free, just like it's a rep thing.

Well, I don't think it's that. I think it's the money. Well, Oscar loves to gamble, and he's going to a place where someone's willing to gamble him for a lot of money.

Wait, you say this thing about Jones? I'm going to listen while I go to piss. Go piss, go piss.

We'll pause, we'll pause. We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not I'm not gonna say the whole thing. We'll pause. We're back, folks. We're back. So what I was saying is, uh, my friend Jeremy Jones, who was a US Open champion, he said he went to that pool hall once and he said, I'm never going back.

Too much. It's too much. Too much.

And he's also said that the neighborhood is like, dank. Things can go sideways. Yeah, it's, it's a neighborhood where like, hey, you might go there 3 nights in a row and you have a good time. 4th night, 4 people get shot. You know what I mean?

That was always a problem with underground pool— I mean, poker rooms. Oh, you play, play at Commerce or a place like that's legit, it's fine. You go underground kind of like, there's not— there's a guard there, right?

And you're walking out with a lot of money. I remember when you were struggling in the early days of comedy when we kind of first met. Yeah. And you were making your money by winning pool tournament or poker tournaments. Yeah. You would go to these— at least, yeah, you would go to these casinos and make— and you would play it like a job. You'd be like super serious.

I've read books on it. Yeah, the best book of all the— there's tells and there's strategy. The best, my favorite book is this guy Mike Caro. It's a book called Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells. Um, yeah, I managed to use one of them once in a World Series event. Um, that if it— this is the one where it goes, if someone looks at your chips, it's because they have a killer hand and they think those chips are theirs. And there's a— it's just like, well, you know, when you lie, you look away a little bit. That's like a tell we all kind of know. So you look at the chips, you look at it just for a second, you're like— it's because you're like, those are You're not worried about your chips because you know your chips are staying. You got a full house. You know those are safe. But you're looking at those like, how much of that can I extract? So I was throwing a bluff down against a pro at the World Series. It was like, whatever. And I was like, I think he must have read this book. And so I'm banking on that.

So I'm holding my bluff nothing hand. I just kind of do a very subtly, just do one little. And he goes, yeah, right. And he chucked his hand away. Wow. Yeah. He thought he had me read. But the best thing about Mike Carroll's Poker Tells—

You double-crossed. I double-crossed.

I double-crossed Joe. Clever. Thank you for recognizing that. Love that. Love a double-cross. I love that.

That's so cool. That's the cool thing about poker, that it's like a lot of it's bullshit. You're bullshitting, you know? It's how you play. You're bluffing.

The best thing about the Poker Tells, it was written in the '70s, and there's a bunch of race-based tells. Really?

Yeah, like if a— Which ethnicities? All, all of them.

If an older white man re-raises you, get out. That guy doesn't bluff, he's just trying to play, you know, his wife died years ago, he's just trying to extend. Uh, uh, they're like, if you're playing against a Mexican, find out when payday is, and if it was this Friday, they're bluffing, they're just throwing in anything, they just want to play, they're going to part with their monies. There's a whole thing on Blacks, I forget exactly what they were saying on that, but it was like very interesting.

What year was this written?

I think in the '70s. Interesting.

Back when you could be honest. Yeah.

And he was like, I don't know. I was just telling you how to win. All in the Family days.

Yeah. Yeah. You could get away with a lot of honest observations about different cultures. Oh. Mike Carroll's Book of Poker Tells. Orientals.

Orientals. Are either very skillful or very luck-oriented.

I like it says it now, Asian Americans. What happened to Oriental? What happened to Oriental? Oriental. Someone told me that Oriental is like a slur now.

But it's actually the right word.

Is it? The Orient?

It's people or goods from the Orient. You know what the opposite is? What? You and I. Occidental. People or goods from, I guess, not the Orient.

Really? We're Occidentals? Mm-hmm. You know what's also interesting? It's like Asian— I don't think it exists. Asian is so much of the world. Yeah. Like Asian includes India, which is Asian.

Nah, if I was president, executive border. That's— no, no, that's not who we're talking about. That's not who we're talking about.

Pakistan in Asia? Yeah, right.

That's Middle East. Fuck off. Yeah, fuck off. You know, oh, Israel is also Asia, by the way.

But it's also like the Philippines is Asia.

That's Asia. But I'll give you that. Okay, but it's way over there. It's way over there.

And then you got China, and then you got Japan, and then you got Korea and South Korea and North Korea.

Okay. Okay, let's be real. China and Japan are the obvious ones. Yes. That's Asia.

Those are the big ones. The further you get, the more— Korea. Korea is also a big one.

Korea, okay. Vietnam, you're still in the gold. Mongolia, I don't know. Hmm, well, they're almost Russian. Saudi Arabia is Asia? Fuck off. We're talking about China and their subsidiaries. Look how big Asia is. Cambodia, okay, sure, all the jungles. Wow.

How many have I been through now? So Russia's technically Asia? That's Asian Russia.

Israel is the craziest one.

I cut off right here because it's like European Russia too.

Oh, okay. So there's Asian Russia, so that would be Siberia, right?

The Maldives are—

but that would be like Mongolia for sure. Kazakhstan is Asia. Wow. Yeah, but Mongolia— but a lot of the Kazakhstan guys look Asian, like this guy Shavkat Rakhmonov who fights in the UFC.

A Mongolian accent is crazy because it really is. It sounds like half Chinese, half Russian. Mm-hmm. You know, they look Chinese, speaking like the Russian accent. Hard people, bro. Mm-hmm.

Hard people. Kazakhstan, India, Iran. Iran is Asia? Wow. Israel's Asia.

Israel's Asia. Israel's the edge. Yeah, basically everything that's— all those people are Oriental. Orientals. I'm gonna— next time I go to Jerusalem, I'm gonna call them all Orientals.

Look how close Yemen is to Ethiopia. It feels like you could swim there. Yeah, if you really were motivated.

Damn. Yeah, if you want to, you just go to a pool also.

You don't really have to. Hey, look where Israel— no worries. Look where, uh, Israel is. Maps are so interesting.

See how they split shit up?

Israel's like— that's what's nuts. You ever see the border between, uh, Egypt Egypt and Palestine, that border's nuts.

What do you mean?

Oh my God, it's the most fortified border you've ever seen in your life. You think the border between Israel and Palestine is rough? Really? Yeah, the border between Egypt and Palestine is way harder.

They do not want those people.

They do not want those people over there. You ever seen it? Fucking rolls of barbed wire. It's crazy. Yeah, look at that.

That guy just catch a baby being thrown over.

Click on that one, please. The one that says, uh, the Arab vertically on the top. Yeah, right there. Look at that. Look at that. Wow. Like, you ain't getting through that.

What a nice place to stroll for those two guys.

Just a relaxing afternoon near the Gaza Wall. Look at that. That's crazy.

Sad times.

Oh, the saddest. The saddest.

Peace in the Middle East.

Middle East. Yeah, good luck.

Um, yeah, they're all nuts.

Well, it's even more nuts now. Look what's happening in Lebanon now. They're bombing Lebanon too.

Really? Yeah. Oh my God, any of this?

Israel's bombing the shit out of southern Lebanon.

Lebanon?

Yeah, I was reading about this. Uh, Ryan Grim was covering this, uh, Lebanon reporter, this reporter in Lebanon that Israel killed. They followed her with drones They bombed a car in front of her. She ran into an abandoned building and then they bombed the shit out of the building. And this took hours. And all the while she was contacting like whoever runs Lebanon and they were contacting Israel and saying, hey, this is, this is a reporter. And so then they got text messages between like she, this, someone from the IDF had been saying to them, we're gonna kill you. And then they got the number from her phone and contacted the person from the IDF and they were saying, hey, she works for Hezbollah. And, you know, fuck you and you're naive. It's crazy. Like, they're just openly killing journalists.

You know what they did a good job in when I was traveling is they got it more than up here is separating Israel from Jew. They really were like, we don't have any problem with Jews, but they would like be very staunchly like Israel, Israel. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, if you live in Israel, you have to do military service, right? So everyone who lives in Israel is a part of the military in their eyes. Guys. Like, everyone who lives in Israel has served in the military.

It's interesting though, it's like a lot of those kids and then turn into adults are like very against what they're doing. Oh yeah, it's like an uncovered, I think, um, like part of it. They're like, yeah, we don't like this. I mean, half this country or more even didn't vote for Trump, didn't vote for Biden. So they're like, well, I didn't— I don't like this. But then you still like— you have to like be pro everything about this thing, even though like you cannot like certain things, right?

The idea that like all Israelis have a a single hive mind. That's crazy. That's not the case in any country ever. It's not the same in any crowd. Especially a democracy, because Israel's literally the only democracy over there, really.

Yeah, and they have parliament too, so you have a lot of choices.

And they're trying to prosecute Netanyahu while all this is going on.

Who is, the Israelis? Yeah. Wow.

I mean, this was one of the things that most people aren't aware of, but that before October 7th, there was hundreds of thousands of people on the street in Israel protesting Netanyahu. We talked about it the other day because they were trying to expand, but this was before the war. So they were trying to expand what they can do in terms of like with their constitution. We talked about it. What was the exact, Chammy, do you remember? The exact thing that they were disputing over, but it was expanding the power that the government has. And so people were protesting that. And then all of a sudden October 7th pops off. You gotta support. Yeah. And then, you know. It's what happened here at 9/11.

It became like, if you say anything bad now, you're like a traitor instead of just like, well, I was already saying they have issues with police overstepping or whatever. You're like, but now you can't say that for about 3 years. Oh yeah.

Yeah. So before October 7th, Israel experienced 9 months of massive sustained protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, largely driven by opposition to proposed judicial reform These demonstrations included hundreds of thousands of participants accused the right-wing coalition of undermining democracy, weakening the Supreme Court, and attempting to interfere with Netanyahu's ongoing corruption trial.

Yeah, and so that's the same as here where it's not about like, are you pro-gay marriage or not? Or are you pro like peace with Palestine or not? That's just people taking power. And so that goes beyond the right or left and just go, no, no, that's an overstep.

Yeah. Yeah, it's— but anyway, it's fucked because it's not going to get any better. It's not. And they've destroyed Gaza. Gaza is just a wasteland now. I mean, someone, um, posted recent video of Gaza, like what it looked like now, like right now. They sent a drone or something to get video footage of what Gaza looks like, and it's crazy. It's crazy. It looks like they dropped an a nuke. They just did it slowly. Instead of dropping one nuke, they did thousands of fucking conventional bombs and did the kind of destruction.

It's interesting if you ask people how— how it's like polarizing. Everybody got polarized that you couldn't just be like, any suffering is wrong. But like, yeah, I could show you a dead baby and a lot of people will go, well, what— I gotta know what their last name is first before I can tell you if I feel bad or not. Yeah. Instead of just like, that's, I don't know, clearly wrong.

I know, that's what's so dark about it. Yeah. That's what's so dark. And then if you talk about like what's happening in Gaza, people say, well, October 7th shouldn't have happened. Like, okay, you're right. It shouldn't have. But guess what? Those kids that live in Gaza, they didn't do October 7th. They didn't do it.

So. Like, we're on their team. It's like, I don't know.

What we did to Iran. What if Iran nukes New York City? Those kids that live in the Bronx, they had nothing to do with what happened in Iran. On. So like, is that okay? Like, what are we talking about? This is a mess. It's fucking nuts. It's tribal warfare is fucking bananas that it's still going on.

Well, I was talking to people when I knew like cousins and stuff in the military and they had just gotten out and they were like, we're all now, this is before October 7th. It's like a few years before, maybe 2018. They're like, we're talking now because we have the internet now. And we're like, this isn't sustainable and we don't want to keep doing this. We got to start figuring out a peace thing. And then that's That's all, that's all gone now.

It's all gone. Yeah, not only is it all gone, but now that they've started bombing Lebanon, everybody's really terrified because they're like, well, where is this going? Because they're bombing Christian villages in Lebanon, and there's video of them destroying these solar panels that these Christian villages have in Lebanon where they're just plowing over and using like tractors to take down these solar panels.

Part of me goes to like, this isn't the military, like, what are you doing? Yeah, it still goes back to like Wesley Clark, if I got that right, where they're like, the 7 countries, and Iran was on there and we just hadn't gotten there yet. Oh yeah, but that was always like, that's not a new thing, that was just in the works for a couple decades, just waiting for the time is right.

Yeah, they wanted to do it within 5 years, it took 25, took long. Yeah, the Wesley Clark thing is funny because, you know, Dave Smith had a debate with Coleman Hughes about that, and Coleman Hughes is was like, but Wesley Clark never said he read the memo. He said someone told him about the memo. He goes, any historian would not even be able to use that. Oh, I thought they said they had this. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. I think the way Coleman was describing it— but the reality is, okay, you— yeah, you might be right. Maybe because he hadn't read it, any historian would not have been able to use it in the book. But the fact that it all took place exactly how the memo That seems relevant.

And that came out before. So you're like, hey, we're going to Iran soon. And then it's like, they did Syria. They kept trying. Syria was the best to me because when Obama was doing it, and I don't care who's in charge, they're all doing the same shit to me. But they go, we got to go in there to overthrow this dictator. And then people would just come off the whole like Middle Eastern war, like, no, we're done. And so they couldn't justify it. And then they go, hey, this is insurgent group and they're going to get out of hand. We got to go in and control them. And then it's like, wait, you want to go fight the guy who was fighting against Assad? And then that ended, and they go, no, we got to take down Assad. And it's like, you really seem like you guys want to go into Syria. I'm looking for any sort of excuse. Oh, it's all crazy. Politics is stupid. Let's move on. It's like— it is gross.

Yeah, yeah, your perspective is probably the healthiest.

Just stay out of it.

Stay out of it. Leave me alone. Fuck you. Live my life. But the thing is like some of it does affect your life, like this psychedelic drugs thing.

Okay, so in that moment where you got fucking— maybe hopefully shrooms legalized, you know, in an ideal world— is a very rare case of someone who can actually accomplish change. And you're at a higher level than most people in terms of influence, both personally and like broad broadly, but also the individual, like him.

Like, most people wouldn't do it that way. Like, if I was friends with Obama, there's not a fucking chance in hell I could have gone to Obama and say, hey dude, you know what'd be cool? If you got ibogaine legalized, it would keep all these people that are addicted— that he could have done that decades ago. Everyone could have done that. They've known about ibogaine forever, and they've also known about the pill crisis forever. So all this stuff was common knowledge among Plenty of people. I mean, Johns Hopkins has been doing these studies.

Johns Hopkins has a playlist for shrooms and MDMA. They make a playlist for you. They do. That you can like, this is a good MDMA or shrooms— I forget which one— shrooms playlist.

Is it like Johns Hopkins sanctioned it or someone who—

Yeah, no, someone who works there.

A student there?

No, no, no, a professor or something like that in the research they're doing in the psilocybin research. It was all psilocybin, right? And not—

I think Johns Hopkins was all psilocybin. Yeah, they all kind of led the way.

They have a playlist you can get. It's on Spotify.

I always remember people have been aware of it for so long, you know. Inside the John Hopkins psilocybin playlist. Oh wow, this is 2020, dude.

I'm always amazed when my memory turns out to not be false.

Look at that guy, he looks like he's tripping. He looks like he trips. He's like an old dude who's tripped. Just hug people. Look at his smile. That guy's not working for insurance company.

Loosen his tie.

Yeah, Bill Richards, look how he's tripped. Psychologist and researcher. They should put researcher in quotes.

Psychologist, researcher, and former deadhead.

Yeah, I think of it as nonverbal, a nonverbal support system, sort of like a net for a trapeze artist. If all's going well, you're not even aware the net is there. You don't even hear the music. But if you start getting anxious or if you need it, it's immediately there to provide a structure. Oh, Bill, you trip hard.

When I was doing ayahuasca, this guy was like, this shaman guy was like beating a drum very lightly. And when you come out of it, whatever, the slow, like Bum, bum, bum. It would kind of like pull you back into it. Mm, mm.

7-hour and 40-minute playlist.

Boy, those guys go hard. They make sure.

Put that on loop. Symphony of sorrowful songs. Hey, don't do that. Don't give me sorrowful songs while I'm tripping.

You're trying to have a bad time. Yeah, I want to hear big emotional music. Thinking about your grandmother's death. No, no, Grandma. People always ask me about mushrooms, like, is it gonna be this emotional, like, like spiritual thing? I'm like, yeah, that's— get— that gets hyped more. You're gonna laugh with your friends. Yeah, that's the main thing. There's gonna be—

I mean, it depends on the dose, right? Like, a heavy dose will bring you to a very strange place.

Dude, I had a best mushroom trip of all time on this trip. Yeah, yeah, of all time.

Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe the first one. The Muhammad Ali of mushroom trips.

Yeah, it wasn't like it was crazy hard, it was just they were fresh and it was just like the thoughts and it was just in places where nobody really gave a fuck, so you didn't feel like you're like a drug addict. Mm. And just like, yeah, just seeing everything so clear. Mushrooms fucking rule. You just see everything so clear. It kills the you in your brain.

Well, it kills the bullshit part. Yeah.

And so you go like, look at this behavior, and it's same as analyzing someone else's behavior or your own. There's this same.

That's a part of one of the problems that comes with living a stressful life, is you get really wrapped up in yourself. Like, you're managing yourself, you're managing your thoughts, you're managing your whatever you're trying to do. And you think so much about you that a thing like that can take you out of that and you go, oh, what am I wasting my thoughts on this for? Why am I wasting my energy on this? It's so pointless. It's not helping me at all.

And you see people. Yeah, my father for like who he really is now, just like a loving, caring granddad. And they're like, oh, what a fucking cool guy that I always saw as like this guy I grew up with. And then just like, man, yeah, and just like realizing like I'm doing the same stuff he did, like going, you know, starting a new life. Mm-hmm. He did the same shit coming to America. And it's like, wow, what a— look at it separately from your father. Like, that's a cool guy.

You talked about having your father come on this podcast to talk about his experience as a Holocaust survivor. He would. How old is he now? He's about to be 90.

Wow. Still with it though. He's not like a feeble. That's awesome. Yeah. Would he do it? He would do it. He loves getting the word out. How old was he when he was in the camps? Young. Single digits. Wow. Um, and maybe up to— I think maybe released at 12. Yeah, he would do it. He would love it because he works at the Holocaust Memorial as a docent or something. And he has a tattoo and everything.

And everything. Does he have a tattoo?

I don't think so. No, he wasn't in a death camp, he was in a work camp. His— I believe this is all shit— I believe his— my grandfather, his dad, was in— was liberated from a death camp. But yeah, well, you should talk to him. He would actually love it. He loves getting the word out. I've seen him make speeches before, and there's all these inner-city kids from like Kansas City, you know, and then when they hear him talk, it's just this moment you realize like, oh, this isn't a story, this is like his life. Yeah, it's a real thing. Yeah, like Attila the Hun, you're like, that seems like a fictional character. Yeah, because they're so removed from it. And this is just at the borderline of that, dude. He would— he would— yeah, you should do it. I would do it.

I'd love to have him on, talk to him. It's, um, it's a weird time with, uh, weird time with anything that has anything to do with people being Jewish because, yeah, they conflate Jewish people with the Israeli government, the Netanyahu government, and what they're doing in Gaza and what they're doing all the other places. And it's also, it's like, there's a weird time now where people, people are enjoying questioning the numbers of people that died in the Holocaust.

It's the internet. Yeah, retarded. It's just kind of like, but just like, but there is some weirdness to it.

And one of the weirdness to it is like there's some photos of like Auschwitz and a lot of these other camps that they took after the camps were liberated and they had people people go there and they took photos of them, a lot, like pretending that these people were at the camps and they weren't. They were done after the fact. Yeah, but there's also tons of videos.

It was only 1 million, so that's okay somehow? You want to justify it in your head? Yeah, it's—

that's where it's weird.

I don't know, but it's 600 people, I'd be like, right?

Well, it's clearly— there was a lot of people. It was— I don't know what the number is. But if it was 6 million or if it was 1 million or 3 million, it's like to catch people like, "No, no, you guys said it was 6." Like, they're all— the thing is like, it's the '30s and '40s, so it's like, I don't know how to—

and we're guessing. We don't have that. We don't have the wherewithal. And you ask somebody in the Holocaust, they go, "Well, I was only in my one camp.

I can't tell you what was going on at Bergen-Belsen." But there's people that are like equally sure that it was 6 million, and then there's people that are equally sure that it was like 300,000 or 600,000 or whatever the fuck they think it was. And it's like this weird argument back and forth.

I mean, you have to see how many Jews were in Europe before and after, right? And there should be more. It's funny, you can see like if you have a stat like that, like separated from this, like in, uh, as in Peru, we were hiking Machu Picchu, Machu Picchu, me and O'Neill. Oh, we gotta talk about that. And, and, uh, and they're like, it's fucking pouring rain and everybody there, they're not liberal or conservative. Conservative, they just go, "It's been raining earlier than it should be." And they don't know about the word climate change. They just go, "We're told November 1st is when you plant. After that, you're in a risk.

Now this is mid-October and I don't know what's up." Well, there's going to be climate change whether human beings are here or not. That's the reality of the Earth. The Earth's temperature and climate has never been static. Right. And the real problem with climate change is not recognizing that human beings are having an adverse effect on the planet, 'cause we certainly are in terms of pollution, particulate release, but that people like Al Gore and a lot of these fucking, these greenies, they're profiting off of this concept of climate change and then also using it to clamp down on people's rights.

There's that too. Like we talked about people taking money from a good cause and just like, so it's like, exactly. For every good thing, they'll be like, somebody's going to misuse it. 100%. So it all gets conflated.

But then it becomes a thing where Like, you know, when I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast, he was like talking about, I was like, and I said to him, I go, problem with climate change is not just that the climate is changing, 'cause it always has, but that people are having an effect on it, 'cause they definitely are, but it's that there's a lot of money in this whole concept of climate change.

The fake recycling that was never done.

Fake ground landfills, solid landfills.

But it's better than nothing, like no, it's equal to nothing.

Well, it's not only that, but you fucking made people feel like they were doing good by throwing their fucking water bottles in the blue thing. Yes, pacifying them.

It's such a— it's just, it's, it's all kind of crazy, but we're gross.

Yeah, people are gross.

But it was cool to see people's perspectives that were like away from political and just their observations about stuff.

Recognize that things change. Yeah, and like Sub-Saharan Africa used to be lush greenlands. I mean, they find, they find whale bones in Sub-Saharan Africa in the desert. In the desert, they find whale skeletons in the desert. Desert way before there were cars, right? Okay, way before there were plastic and power plants. So the Earth's climate has never been static. But the Machu Picchu thing is— I really want to go there. My friend Luke Caverns, he's been on the podcast before. He's studied. He's been 3 times.

Has he really? But as a kid, that's what I meant. Like, oh yeah, so they're like, it's a 1-hour flight from Lima and then just take the train. But like, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty wild. So you're saying it wasn't even the Aztecs? Is that what you told me?

Well, that's— yeah, that's the Incas. Yeah, it wasn't. They, they don't think it was. They think the initial monolithic structures were— or megalithic structures were an earlier, previously unknown civilization because the size and scope of their structure structures, the way they build it, and Graham Hancock has gone over this as well, is so much different than the stuff that's on top of it. So what happens is you have this old stuff that's enormous stones that are cut like jigsaws, right? Yeah. And almost like it's melted, like the way it looks, it almost like—

You can't put a piece of paper through it after 200 years of like breakdowns. You still can't put— Way more than 200 years.

It's thousands of years. But the thing that's really nutty about it is that design is because when they have earthquakes, that way it won't fall fall off, right? It disperses the energy better as opposed to just stacking stuff on top of each other. That stuff falls, but when it's all interlocked in these weird forms like that shit—

that— yeah. So Che Guevara talks about a little bit where he goes, so Cusco is the gem of South America. It was the border of the Andes where people would come in and do trade and everything. And you see this, and the Christians would come in, take over, and build like facades on it and put a cross on top to be like, look what we did, we're more dominant. People. And then an earthquake could come, facade would fall, and this would just remain over and over and over again. These aren't even squares. Look at how— it's like Tetris.

Yeah, it's so cool. And that was on purpose. They did that because that's what would survive. But if you look at the stuff above it, that's the stuff that the Incas made. So the Incas made this stuff. It's like, it's all just stacked. It's not as sophisticated and also not as large because they didn't have the technology. Whatever the fuck these people had that was a big— that rock is huge. I mean, hundreds and thousands of tons. I mean, these things are fucking enormous. The really crazy one is the Lebanon ones. In Lebanon— I've been there.

Wait, no, I'm Jordan. Jordan, I'm talking about— is the—

so in Lebanon, they have these massive stones. What are they called, Jamie? The Trilithon stones. So there's these stones that are like more than 1,000 tons stones, and they're like several meters above the ground placed, and then on top of them, you have these Roman structures. Oh, right. So, if you see like there, like that click where you had your cursor? Yeah. Look at the size of that guy. Wow. And look at the size of that stone. Like, and then you see the stuff on top of it is smaller. It's not as sophisticated. And then you had the Roman— now, the thing about the Romans is Romans had meticulous record bookkeeping, and they talked about all the construction of all the different things they had. They don't even mention those stones, so they don't mention how they— no, I don't think it was them. I think it was a previous civilization. Look at that fucking thing!

Oh bro, I'm about to— you know Nazca Lines? Yes. Okay. Oh yeah, I saw them. Oh, did you? Yeah, I flew over them, bro. How weird is that? They're so big you can't— the pictures won't do it justice because you'll see like a road they didn't know because from the ground level you can't see any of it. Yeah, and so they just build these roads through desert. And so you can see a car sometimes, like, so that's for perspective. And you're like, it's this dot on this giant monkey in the middle of the desert, right? For however many hundreds of years.

Yeah, they don't even know how long.

They're crazy weird. And they're all like signals to something. There's all these theories on what it is. Sky.

You have to see them from above.

You can only see them from above. That's nuts. Pilots would go over there and then somebody's like, what's that? I go, oh yeah, we don't know, we just kind of go over?

Well, they found a bunch of them now because of AI, you know. They've like scanned the areas and found a bunch of previously undiscovered Nazca lines. Wow. Yeah. And the weird thing about is that's also the place where they find these people with elongated skulls. They find like these weird skulls that have additional capacity, so they have like 30% more capacity. And they, they don't have the same lines in their skulls that we have like when we're babies, you know. We have these— what are they called? Sagittal? I forget what the lines are called? Sagittal crest. Sagittal crest. These lines that we have in our skull, you know, like your skull's not just one piece, right? It's like, it's a bunch of pieces that merge together.

They age, you just tie them off so they get longer as a sign of like—

Yeah, but some of these skulls don't have the same structure as ours. They're human skulls, but they're longer. They have more capacity, the 30% larger capacity, and they don't have those lines that we have. So it's like, what was that? Were there different kinds of humans back then?

I guess they died out.

Were there— were they flying around? Were they flying around and making these fucking structures? Were they responsible for Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu and all these other places? And they just died off, and all we have left is like some skulls that we can't totally explain.

We don't have the means to explain it, right?

Because if it was 20,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago, whatever it was that these people were ruling back then, what would be left? Fucking nothing. Nothing. Very little.

I mean, look at Angkor Wat where it's like— that's— yeah, if you didn't see it, it's shocking any of it remained.

Yeah, well, Angkor Wat's crazy. And how about that other one in India where the entire temple's carved out of one stone?

Or the one in Jordan, the— see, what is it? Fucking— what is those place? The Indiana Jones Jones one. What's that called? That's where I went with my brother.

Yeah, what is that called?

See, what is it, Jimmy? Petra. Petra. It's, it's nuts. You come through this canyon and it's just in a mountain, a giant 3-story temple that is just carved out of the mountain. It wasn't added to, right?

And where's the stone? Where'd you put the stones? What'd you do?

That view coming out of the middle one, coming out of that cavern and seeing it after about an hour hike, that's crazy. That doesn't even— you have to see a human, see how small that person is in the middle. That is so crazy. So like, what? Right.

Have you ever heard of Derinkuyu? No. In Turkey. This is crazy. You wanna hear this one?

A place or a person?

It's a place. So I think they found this because someone was doing like construction on a house. Yeah. And they found a Oh, so this is what it was. So a guy kept losing his chickens. They would go through a hole and they would never come out. So this guy was like, well, where the fuck are these chickens going? So they broke down the wall to figure out where the chickens go, and they found an underground city that can hold 20,000 people. Turkey? With many, many levels, like many levels deep into the ground. Wow, it's fucking bananas. Wow. Yeah, I watched a documentary. Now you see how— like, we see the way where you— could you please go back to that one image with the houses? Yeah, like that. Like, so this guy, it was like behind a fucking wall in the house. So these chickens would go into the hole, they would just disappear. Disappear. So it's like, where's my fucking chickens? So the guy starts digging around to try to figure out where the chickens go, and they found this. And I want to say they found this in like the 20th century.

Like, I think it was the '20s.

I just saw 1920s, like '29 maybe.

Wow. So no, they forgot about it.

Nobody knew about it. Nobody knew who made it. There was no record of it. And it's so big, it can house 20,000 people in there. What was it for? No one knows. Right. No one knows when. No one knows who. No one knows nothing. There's other ones they found in China. They found this fucking insane one in China that also has no records. It's enormous. Like enormous caverns with giant columns. It's all carved out of the stone. They moved millions of tons of rocks out of there. No record. No one knows where the stone went. Went.

I was staying with the Lakandans, Mayans, whatever, and, uh, we were on a hike and there was this little like abandoned temple just the size of this room. And so the guide was like, so now there's a tunnel in here to like the main temple, it's about a mile and a half away, and there's a tunnel where you can go through it. It takes a couple hours to walk. Fuck. And he goes, he goes, my brother once, he goes, I'll never go back, it's so frightening, and there's fucking pumas around and you don't know. Pumas in the tunnel? Yeah, you're like, you can't see shit. He goes, it's a bad place, but it's this long underground This is a tunnel that was made however long ago. What the fuck?

This is the one in China. This is one of the caves. So this is one of these caves in China. By the way, no record, no historical record of when it was created or who created it. They put up— wow. And this is another one that they found. In 1992, they found it. 4 farmers in Longyou found the caves, and they drained the water from 5 small ponds in their village. The ponds turned out to be 5 large man-made caves. Caverns. Further investigation revealed 19 more caverns nearby. They've been determined to be more than 2,000 years old, and their construction is not recorded in any historical documents. Like, look how crazy. Please show some of those images.

Yeah, it's the only one on this page. Uh, fucking bananas.

So they're just guessing that it's 2,000 years old. They don't know, right?

Right. They're just like, because there's no record, there's no record of it.

But it's bananas. And they've also— those carvings, they think are post—

Later people came in. Post-discovery. That's their way of doing—

Yeah, because you see how like those lines on the walls, that's how everything looks. It's just those carved straight lines. And it looks like the other stuff was like more modern that they carved in.

You think those lines are so that the erosion wouldn't hurt it as much?

I don't know. I mean, that might've been how they did it. They might've had some sort of a device that they carved the stone out with. But the thing is, it's like—

Where's this on a map? Show me where Longyou is on a map. Map. Yeah, I want to visit a lot of China. There's some— a lot of places in there that I'm like, don't know about. China's a big ass— back out, back out. China's so big. Longyou Caverns. Keep going back, keep going back. Context. Oh my God, that's pretty deep in there. Yeah, good luck.

It's near Wuhan. Look. Yeah, take a train to Wuhan, catch a— catch a bus. Yeah, go eat some armadillo.

Pangolin. Pangolin. That's how you got leprosy, eating armadillo and pangolin.

Really not supposed to eat those things. Go back to the images, please. The images are nuts, man. It's like, what were these people doing? Like, why? Who made this?

I love standing in a place like that and just like, you just instantly get connected to the history of it.

Could you imagine it's 1992 and you're just draining a pond? Pond, you're a farmer, and then you drain the pond and you go, "Oh, there's like a cave in here." Open up, find some nickels. And you go in and you see this shit. And no one knows who made it. And China, again, China has extensive historical records, 'cause China has existed for thousands and thousands of years. It's one of the few countries that's essentially been just China for 5,000+ years. Bananas, man.

Aquarium for real dragons.

Somewhere.

Well, I mean, who made it and how did they make it? Like, how did they do that? What purpose? How did they make that 2,000-plus years? And by saying 2,000, it's like you're just—

2,000 means— so there's a Joan Didion piece on El Salvador from a long time time ago. And she goes, they don't use numbers the way we use numbers. They say 50, it means a bunch.

Oh, so like 72 virgins.

Yeah, I mean, just a bunch, an amount.

Yeah, like, bro, he went there a million times.

Tons of, tons of, like, what is a ton?

Oh, bro, I smoked tons of joints. Yeah, no, that's not possible. Break it down. So Perplexity, our AI sponsor, says no one knows for certain who created the Longyou Caves. Archeologists agree they are man-made and probably over 2,000 years old, but there's no record of their builders or entrance. That's crazy, dude. That is so crazy. Oh, pottery and other finds inside date roughly to the late Qin or Western Han period, around 200 BCE, suggesting they were excavated at or before that time. But the thing is, that pottery— but that pottery could have been someone who just left pottery later. Like, it's like if you leave behind a cell phone in Egypt and 5,000 years from now people say, oh, well, this is an iPhone 16, this must be from So that means it has to be at least that old or older. Yeah, at least that old or older. So it's at least 2,000+ years old. But how crazy is that there's no known records?

Should go on quick and just bury some like shit from a long time ago, get some artifacts and just leave it in there.

How much shit like that is still out there in other parts of the world where they don't know about it?

Well, it's like this tunnel that that Mayan guy said. He was like, yeah, no one knows. He goes, me and my friends know about it. Fuck.

So it's just like every Well, we were talking about the Aztecs, about how the Aztecs— and this is another thing that I found out through perplexity when I was just— I was writing this thing about Mexico and about how crazy the history of Mexico is. And, you know, that the Spaniards came over with essentially like 12 muskets and took over the whole country. But when they— when the Aztecs were living in these temples, they didn't build them. They called them the place where the gods were born. So they found them. So there's a previous civilization that, like, Teotihuacan, Teotihuacan, and all these other beautiful pyramids and temples. They don't know who fucking made them. Okay, so they don't know who made them.

That cave in Vietnam was found in 1991. Oh, I saw the 60 Minutes thing on that.

Did you see that? Look at that. That dude from 60 Minutes, like a dude and a lady from 60 Minutes, went and visited this cave, and I was like, that looks— that's Fuck. One cool thing about something like 60 Minutes, that they would do something like that, because it's a long journey. Wow. You have to fly in, drive a long distance, then hike along.

Some of these places aren't any— nothing's there.

You could fit some skyscrapers inside of these caves. They have their own ecosystems. Like, there's clouds in there. It probably fucking rains inside the cave.

There's insects, there's animals that live in these caves that have over time lost their ability to see because they didn't need it, so their hearing goes up, their sight goes down. There's like bugs in like Thailand and like Sapong and places like that where it's like, oh yeah, these places, these animals only exist here.

They hear you breathe. There's a salamander in Barton Creek Springs.

Yeah, special salamander. Oh really? It only lives there?

Salamander that got mixed with weird people swimming in the creek.

Yeah. Oh wow.

They survive on chicks with arm hair. It's only able to survive here.

Cycles. Yeah, I was doing Bottom of the Barrel last night and somebody brought up that there's like, there's nude beaches at Lake Travis. And I'm like, what is it like? Barton Springs? No, no, no, no.

Barton's topless. No, when you take a—

well, maybe, but yeah, when you take one of those boat rides out, chicks, they show the—

bro, it's nice. Nice. Yeah, nice. It's nice. Hippie tits. There'd be some of them were gross hippie tits, but some of them were like real tits, dude. Real ones. Influencers go there too.

Oh, like girls who do too much ayahuasca and they wear wooden beads and they want their tits out, dude. So I was in, I was in Patagonia where Hippie Hollow Park. 4.6 stars.

That's a lot. I was asking people, it was a rafting thing, and I was like, who's the worst? I always try to do this, especially at comedy clubs too. Who's the worst person you've ever had here? Right. So there's like, which country, which people are the worst? And they go, I don't know. I'm like, listen, I'm from Jews, so you can— it's Jews, right? I mean, they want freebies for sure. But like, uh, we're trying to get which, which country's worse. And he goes, well, the worst overall though is Influencer. Influencers, and they have no country, but they make everything about them. They make you pause too long to take their shots. They make you get out of their shot. Oh yeah, we're all just trying to rap. They think they're there for them. Yeah. Ugh.

One of the influencers got arrested in Korea. Johnny Somali. Do you know who that guy is? He was in Korea, and apparently they have some statue that is about— I think it's something about sex slavery, something like that. So he was like kissing the statue and being rude to people, and they just sentenced him to— he did a bunch of shit over there. They sentenced him to 6 months of hard labor in Korea.

We need some of that here for influencers. Quit doing fucking selfie talking on the— while you're walking. You're not a black lady, you don't get to talk to your phone.

Black ladies get to talk.

They love speakerphone. Why do they do it? I don't know. It used to be like, ladies like that.

And it's like, why do you think they like that?

Why did they like it? They want everyone to hear that conversation. Maybe because their fucking nails will cut up their face if they bring it too close. I'm trying to think of possible reasons.

It is weird where like certain cultures gravitate towards certain behavior and activities. It's new racism.

It's fun because it's like, this isn't in the books. This is a brand new observation.

Speakerphone is like, I remember being outside of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. Waffles and saying like, how many, how come so many black guys are on speakerphone? And people like, that's racist. I'm like, no, it's not.

It's a racial observation. Observing. I'm not mad at them. Yeah.

I don't care why, like, why is it worse that I hear both sides of the conversation versus one side? Like if someone's just talking on the phone, why is that less offensive than someone talking?

You can observe, why do the Hasidic Jews always talk on flip phones all the time? And you're like, there's something up or what? Yeah. There's some where it's like, Why do the people used to ask me that when I do Q&As, when I was doing the Jew Hour, building it? So they'd ask questions during a check drops. I'd be like, ask questions. And I would build my material that way.

Oh, that's smart.

But one of them was like, why do they all wear matching clothes? Their daughters are like, if they're once 10, one's 8, why do they wear matching stuff? That's the only one I couldn't figure out until I finally figured it out. It's, um, two-for-one sales.

United threatens to kick off passengers who don't use headphones. Yeah, good. Oh, well, that's because people are like listening to like loud YouTube videos right next to them.

Bro, all over South America. Oh really? It is. Scroll Instagram videos loudly. There's no even thought. We were on an overnight bus once and there was a guy listening to like Best Hollywood Screams. And it was like, dude, we're sleeping. Oh God. It's crazy. They just don't do it. And you want to be like, be quiet. But they're like, why? It's not part of our culture.

It's like the Dominican pool hall. Yeah, exactly.

This is how we do it.

That is used to chaos. It is weird that people get used to a certain amount of chaos.

And that's just normal. New York is a normal jackhammer.

It's like nothing. Yeah, if you live in New York, you're totally accustomed to— Oh, that was what I wanted to send you, Jamie. I don't know, maybe I did send it to you the other day about where they figured out that there's a part of your brain that recognizes when birds aren't chirping. Ooh. And you kind of freak out.

There should be some background noise.

Right, well, if birds aren't chirping, it generally means that predators are nearby.

Their brain is a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing.

Right now in this room, it's on. The circuit predates primates. Whoa. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continually as a predator detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of the mammalian history, the forest full of songbirds song meant that no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

A loud quiet, and you're like, something's up.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. 6 minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. 6 minutes of traffic noise raised depression with same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

I— listen, I'm a hippie, I live in New York, and it's like I gotta get to nature once in a while or I'll go crazy.

That's why we have to protect the parks.

That's why we have to protect the parks. We have to.

Tomorrow, tomorrow we're protecting a park. Tomorrow we are.

Yes, it's back. Fucking this new guy. Listen, I'm a one-issue voter. I'm not a voter at all. But I'm done. Yeah. And it's, it's this. We saved another park, Elizabeth Street Gardens, classic old park. And they go, no, the other guy was like, we got to tear this down for low-income housing. And then Lower East Side, in the East Village, that's a community-oriented place. They take care of shit on their own, always have. They made the park— it's a parks district because they were like, these buildings collapsed, and they're just like, let's build it into parks. And then the city, when it came back, they're like, let's take those back. Like, no, no, no, fuck that. We made We need these. East River Park's massive, but Illusion Street Gardens is tiny. And the other guy, the black guy, whatever his name was. What's his name? Eric Adams. Eric Adams. He goes, I'm gonna protect that park and I'm gonna protect all the parks. Parks got nicer. They redid them all and they painted all the benches. I like them. And he goes, okay. So this community goes, we will find you another place to build low-income housing.

And they did. They had this whole platform and they go, we can do it on this block, down the street there and there. It's actually more houses than you were planning on building. Okay. And now this fucking new guy goes, no, we're gonna raze that to the ground. What? And like, no, no, we did it. We found another place.

I thought he was for it.

They keep trying to get him to like, just say you're gonna protect it. And he's pretty much like, I won't. I won't. Elizabeth Street Gardens is fucking gone if I have my say. Really? Yeah. And I'm like, dude, come on. You're supposed to be of the people. What, again, single-issue voter, I don't know about the rest. You got to protect that park.

So do you think that there's some sort of a financial interest? Someone's getting—

someone's always getting this, someone's always getting that. But you would not think it would be him.

He's a Democratic socialist.

There's a non-capitalist reason why green spaces are important. Yeah, it doesn't bring in money. They try to fuck up with Central Park. They try to fuck this one up. Zilker? Yeah, with underground like garages and stuff and like totally redoing it. The people won, so it didn't happen. But like, there is a thing that helps all of our level of life.

Level of Central Park is a great idea.

It would never do that now if it wasn't already done.

Yeah, we were talking about this with Bryan Simpson. I was like, if I lived in New York City, like if something happened and I had to do JRE from New York City, yeah, I would have to live near the park because I would have to have my my dog. I'm not gonna get rid of my dog. Yeah, so if I'd have to take— I just have to like have a place where I 100% were able to take— I'd have a routine where I'm taking him to the park every day.

Central Park rules. And you see somebody playing saxophone and you feel like you're in a Woody Allen movie, bro.

Central Park's incredible. It's so big too. When you stay in a hotel that like looks over the park, you really get a sense of the scope, this— the size of it, fly over, scale of it is incredible. It's So, and by the way, they would love to sell that off. Oh yeah. And just start stacking it up, make it look like China, you know, like one of those big cities.

You need green spaces. They are important to our way of life. Yeah. It's good for your dome, obviously.

It's good for the fucking mind. Yeah. It's healthy. But even Central Park, it's like, it's not as good as like real wilderness.

Real, yeah. Central Park will buy me 2 days of sanity. I gotta get to the actual woods and then I get a week or 2.

Central Park will balance you out. Yeah, it'll balance you out. Like, it's way better than no. And it seems like people are cooler there. Like, every time I've been in Central Park, people seem like a little nicer. Like, like, if you run into people on Broadway, they don't seem as nice as people that you run into in Central Park.

It's not this— yeah, there's also that thing with like, hey, no smoking in here. Like, I'm really sorry, and then you put it out, light it up as soon as you're gone.

But like, you can't smoke in Central Park?

Nothing. Really? You do, but weed. But cigarettes, they get more mad at. But also, like, yeah, if I got a cigar and I'm with a friend, I'm smoking. Yeah, well, I could see how that would annoy people.

Sure, but also chill. But you can walk down the street in New York and smoke a cigarette, right? Or joint.

Yeah, right. Yeah, still weird to me when I see a Black guy on a stoop rolling a joint and I'm like, what are you doing? That's legal. You're gonna go to jail. But it's right. I know, it's totally legal.

Well, now it's different nationwide because Trump just changed it to Schedule 3. Again, this is something that Obama could have done, Biden could have done, Clinton could have done it.

Trump One could have done it. Yeah.

And now it's Schedule 3, which is still not good. I mean, it should be just like alcohol, but at least it's getting close.

It's getting close. Dude, I had moments out there of nature where like you're in the middle of nowhere and you really do feel rejuvenated like that. Oh yeah. Where you're like, you're not even, it's not even hiking culture. So it's like you're not passing anyone. Right. For hours and hours and hours. You're at peace. You're just at peace.

And whatever that thing is that they've just discovered about birds, there's a similar thing that your body recognizes when you're actually in real nature. It feels different. There's no cell phone signal. The ground—

you know anything about grounding? Yes. What's your, what's your take on it?

Well, Huberman believes it's a real thing, and so I always trust Huberman.

Yeah, because he's very objective about all the electromagnetic waves coming off the ground that you need to get in touch with. It does feel good.

I take the dogs out in the yard and I walk around barefoot. It feels good. I mean, I'm just judging it based on how it makes me feel.

It's like that word tree hugger got a bad rap and It's like it comes from like, touch that, they're in the ground, so you're connected to the ground.

Probably comes from people that were tripping balls, because if you're tripping balls, those trees hug you back.

I've been there, yeah.

Those trees hug you back, they talk to you.

They're like, "Hello, Ari." You could feel the cells. "I'm an oak tree.

I've been here for 300 years. I've been here before this was America." Yeah, it's pretty wild. When I go to the mountains, especially like the elk hunting mountains, because it's so hard to get there, when you get there, there's no cell phone service. And when you're up there, you feel different. You just feel different. You feel better.

You really do feel more relaxed. My brain was firing in a way that it hadn't fired in so long. It was just like all the, the shit holding you down just like pulled off. And after not very much time, it was like, just thoughts, creative thoughts were just like pouring out of me.

So you, in the 6 months you were gone, no social media, no social media.

I took, I took YMH's on a piece of paper, a couple people from YMH's emails. I got 2 months ahead on my ads and my podcast on You Be Trippin'. So I'm like, you guys are set for 2 months. You don't need me. And then after—

So did you record a bunch of episodes in advance? A year's worth.

Oh, I did my work.

Oh my God. That's crazy. Yeah.

They're all evergreen episodes. How did you do that?

Work.

I, one, worked hard, two, loved hearing about travel. I love it. So like, it wasn't much work for me to come in and be like, tell me about Cambodia. Tell me about Thailand. Tell me about Taiwan. Tell me about Uruguay.

Well, that's how I feel about podcasting in general. Yeah, you like it.

You have here or there, you're like, this guy sucked. I wish I should have stayed home. But generally like, that's really interesting. So I love it and I just got way ahead. It's funny when I, like Danny Polishek, I put out an episode, he goes, did we do it like 2 years ago? And I'm like, I wasn't timed yet. I don't know. Oh wow.

Or I'll save it for if a comic has a special, like let's just record it now.

In 9 months you'll have a special. I'll put it—

how many do you have banked through July still?

Whoa. Yeah, that's crazy.

So how many did you do a week?

Sometimes none, sometimes, sometimes like 6 or 7. I was very— oh really? You be tripping, dude. I was— I, I see every mistake I made for the Skeptic Tank and I was like, let's avoid that.

Like, what kind of mistakes are you making?

So like, minimum of effort on my part technologically. So So I— YMH is my Jamie, right? Here's the footage, handle. By the way, settle down because they're not— they're my version of Jamie.

This is the only— this is the GOAT.

Well, I have 15 people doing one Jamie job.

Yeah, so that's the problem. Like, when people talk about like, who should I hire?

I'm like, well, I don't know what to tell you.

You need a guy on the spectrum.

But yeah, but I did— I did that. I just kept— sometimes I'd be like, do 2 a day for 4 straight days. And any comic who goes, hey, I'm sorry, I'm busy, I'm like, buddy, let's reschedule. This isn't supposed to be stressful, right? Let's do it when you have time. No, yeah, chill, no big deal. That's the way to do it. And, and once you're ahead, you can afford a week with nothing. And it wasn't like, I gotta find someone, we got to do this now. Yeah, that's out. Yeah, that's out. All the music choices I used to make, I'm like, that's a lot of work.

Yeah, well, the music thing is the problem, is like you get flagged now. Should be used to— we used to be able to play music on YouTube all the time, and now everything gets flagged. Flagged. You gotta be real careful. We used to play songs almost every episode. Full song.

Yeah.

When there was nothing, when the show made zero money. It was the wild west.

It was so fun. You're actually making a fun thing. It was so outlaw. It's a little more corporate now, which is sad, but also fine. It helps people a lot more now. But man, podcasting was just do whatever the fuck you want.

Well, we were at the early, early days. Like when I started this thing, it was 2009. 2009. It's almost 20 years old, which is so nuts.

Have you figured out a way to monetize it yet?

Not yet. I'm working on it. I think I'm going to sell rubber pussies. You were for a bit.

You were for a bit. That was my first sponsor. Only sponsor. I don't need another one. We're good.

It was funny because Sam Harris was like one of his requests when he first did my podcast. Please don't mention pussies. Wouldn't let me do an ad for the Fleshlight. I said, okay, okay, it doesn't matter. Like, it's not like it's paying a lot of money. It was just fun more than anything.

Yeah, but so I would wait. So after 2 months, I'd go, hey, I need the next month's of ads. And I would take one day, I would just do all the ads and the bumpers. Like, this guy's got a new special. Here's his tour dates. I'd find a waterfall or something and I would do it in a fun place. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was just like, let's do it fun. If I'm going to do remote, let's be remote. Yeah.

How did you do it? Do you do it video as well? Yeah. IPhone.

So Jamie told me this a long time, my first trip to Southeast Asia, I was like, hey, I need a pocket camera, like, what's the best? And he was like, bro, you're not gonna want to hear this, it's the iPhone.

Yeah, the best one. Or a Galaxy, like any modern cell phone. But yeah, any modern cell phone, the video is fucking incredible. And stabilizers, yeah, the video stabilization is amazing. And all you do is you set it up on a little tripod and it'll go for fucking hours.

Yeah, so I'll put it on a tree far away. I did one for a Danny Brown episode episode in, in like Sucre, Bolivia, in front of the statue of Sucre. Oh wow. And it's just like, you guys were in Bolivia?

That was everywhere.

Wow, dude. I was— I saw inauguration for the first president they had in 20 years. Where? In Sucre, in Bolivia. Whoa. They had the old guy who was running things for 20 years. Okay, a crazy dude that everyone hated. He said farming is more important than industry here, so we should give the farmers 2 votes per person and the cities get 1. Now they also run the media there. So everyone in the farmlands, in the heartland, they didn't see any of the problems. Right. City shit. So they go, I don't know, everything on the radio says the guy's doing a great job. Let's vote him in again. He's doing great. I listen to the radio. The guy's doing a great job. And everyone in the city is like, oh no, he's lying. So everything went to shit. 20 years. Like, well, let's throw on the radio again. Just turn on like Trump News and see what Trump is saying about Trump. It's gonna be pretty good. Right. Oh yeah, there I am. Is this the video? Uh-huh. Oh wow. I pretend to be talking on my cell phone 'cause it's so embarrassing. Wow. So I pretend to be talking on my phone, but I just have a cordless mic.

Is Danny still sober? I think he's back on weed, but like, yeah, he's off the drugs.

The alcohol was the issue.

Yeah. Last time we did a podcast, he got obliterated. He's sober. Nice.

Yeah, good friend. Doing great. Bolivia. What is there like? It was always Bolivian marching powder. It was what, when I was a kid, what do people would call cocaine. Interesting.

The salt flats were really cool there. Yeah, just like miles and miles of salt fields. Oh, there's me and O'Neill in Peru.

Look at you guys with your stupid hats on.

Yeah, I would just try to find weird spots and like, I don't know, let's just film something.

Why were you wearing those hats?

Where's Peru? Those are the alpaca hats that keep you warm.

Oh, I went hunting. My first time hunting, I wore those hats. They're great. And Steve Rannella was saying that's a very left-wing hat. I'm like, why? Why? Why is it left-wing? It's warm. Yeah, what? So I don't know about your hat. Leave it alone. I'm about to kill something. Steve, chill.

I'm about to murder something.

I killed that deer with that fucking— my left-wing hat on. But that's all I would do.

I just weigh in once in a while, get my month's worth of stuff, and then go back to disappearing. And I'm telling you, buddy, my brain was so alive. I would just like— you just don't realize what you're dealing with responsibility-wise all the time. And then when you have none, it's like you just kind of be yourself. I came up with this whole— my storytelling shows up. I came with this whole like how to frame it all, how to do everything. I had a vision of like this prolog that I want to bridge the gap. It's called The End. It's out now.

And this is— and then did you film all that with, uh, Your Mom's House Studios as well? Yeah, yeah, nice. Yeah, they might be the only group like that that's actually good.

Tom was like, how much do you have? I'm like, I have about 80% of it. He goes, I'll put in the rest, I'll supply all the, all the people you need to make it happen. Um, and then he's not a network, right? He's Segura, and he's a fucking dirtbag. So he's like, say whatever you want, there's no censoring when it's Segura, you know?

Well, it's also like Tom has made so much money that he's out, you know what I mean? He'll do whatever the fuck he wants. Yeah, you can't stop him. He's gonna do whatever he wants now. Yeah. Oh nice, look at all these episodes. Miss Pat, the Stefano, look at that.

Duncan did a great one. Nice.

Bobby, Shane, Shane, Bobby Kelly, Big J. Yeah, we made the show again.

And then this prolog, it's something I had a vision of this on that mushroom trip. Oh wow. About how to frame like what happened to this not happening and what is this thing now and how to like go through it. And then I talked to a bunch of artists while I was gone and some made pictures. And this guy, William Child, he actually did a Danny Brown video. He's just, shit, I don't wanna ruin this.

Where'd you film these?

The Box in New York City. Place where Chappelle would have his comedian balls.

Where'd you get that gay outfit?

The gay outfit, Joe, is from, do you remember a show called This Is Not Happening? Yes. That I did, completely legally unrelated to this new show. You can say whatever you want, but I cannot. But that was a comedian telling stories in a strip club. This is a strip club with a comedian telling stories. The first year they go, hey, you gotta wear the same outfit every day. And I go, no, that's fake. They go, no, I know, but we gotta mix and match days, so we gotta do it.

Oh, why? Is anybody gonna tune out because they see you in the same outfit?

No, it'll be like, it's weird, suddenly you're hosting a different thing. So I'd start wearing ridiculous suits I made in Hong Kong. Oh, yeah. And then my final year I had this Indian outfit picked out that I went and sourced in LA and had this cool Indian outfit.

All right, now it's cool. I thought it was gay.

And I saved it for 7 or 8 years. When that show got taken away from me, I was like, I'm saving— if I ever do this again, I'm wearing this fucking outfit out of respect to Overcoming.

Those days were very fascinating. The days where Comedy Central was trying to force you into doing a Comedy Central special, but you had a deal with Netflix Netflix. And even though it was completely legal and contractually legal for you to do a comedy special with Netflix, Comedy Central was strong-arming you into doing it on Comedy Central and canceled your fucking show because you wouldn't do a special with them. So you had a successful show on— people want to know how gross Hollywood can get? Yeah. Ari had a successful show that was doing very well on Comedy Central, and they canceled it because he wouldn't do a comedy special.

Because I paid for my— it was one of the early ones— paid for my own special. Uh-huh. And then I said, I got to figure out where it's going. And they go, it should be here. And I go, no, no, I don't think it should. It's also— it was a double special, and it was like, it needs to be on a streamer more than a network. And I was like, no, I'm going to Netflix. And yeah, and then they were like, let's go blackmail them. It's crazy. I get it from their perspective. No, I don't. They're like, hey, we can't be losing power. And they never really— they always thought it was an open mic. But it's—

it was not losing power because the reality is that would just bring more people to the Comedy Central show.

And Netflix back then was so much bigger to do a special. When I did that 2017 special on Netflix, I was the mayor of New York for like 3 weeks. Everywhere I go, I'd bike at a red light, 3 people would recognize you. It was a different time for specials. Specials then. And of course that was the biggest thing. I'm gonna do that.

Yeah, well, there's— it's still pretty big.

Netflix, it's still pretty big, but not Jew. They picked it up.

Oh, that's right, they picked up Jew.

Yeah, it's on Netflix right now. Nice. But yeah, and so people ask me with this show, like, why didn't you go to Netflix? Or like, I'm like, dude, networks killed me. Not only that, I, I don't want to— yeah, I'd rather just go straight to the people on this.

Why do it? It's like there's no reason to it. At this point, especially like Comedy Central doesn't even exist anymore. That's what's nuts. It was a wild time.

You said you would host for free.

Yeah.

I was on the phone with you crying. I was like hearing it that they're taking away from Inglewood.

I said, "Tell them I will host it for free." Because you were gonna take out a loan to pay off all the crew. Because all the crew had signed on for, you know, X amount of episodes and it was gonna cost them money. And you were like, "I'm trying to figure out a way to keep us on the air." I go, tell Comedy Central, I will host it for free.

You were already— it was 2017. This podcast was already going. Oh, yeah. It was huge by then.

Yeah. But it was number 1 in 2019 is when it first started being number 1. But it was probably—

It was pretty big. It topped 4. You were— had pedigree on the show. You'd done 2 stories, one you liked, one you hated. But the one you liked was a great story. That was a great one. That's a great story, Dothan, Alabama. Yeah, and I was like, oh, he's part of the show. This kind of goes— if someone's got to do it, let's— I'll do it for free. You're saving money and getting a much bigger host.

They just wanted to fuck you.

They, they just wanted to fuck anyone I suggested. They said no. I said Ali Siddiq should do it. That's a no.

Yeah, first they went with Roy. Roy was really good, but it was great, but it only lasted like— it was over.

It was over after that.

But that show could have gone on a long fucking time. It was such a great idea. Great idea, it was great execution, it was fun to do, it was really enjoyed in a moment where alt comedy and the ironic distance was getting bigger.

Yeah, this was a more real thing. Yeah, and people responded to it.

And, uh, listen, but it just shows you the grossness of the business sometimes when these people who are just gatekeeping executives, they're really saying, oh, you're not on the list. Yeah, and they don't exist anymore. That's what's, that's what's most—

well, that's the cool thing, you can go Tom, you can go to a guy like that or whatever. And he goes, no, I love the show. It made me, it made me bigger. Let's get it going again. Yeah, yeah.

And it's also like 9 years later, like the internet has completely taken over. Like it has drowned out all of those comedy networks. They don't exist anymore.

Yeah, you need some level of curation or you're lost in a sea of content sometimes. Sometimes, but there's people you can trust, you know. If, if you want meditation, that guy Sam Harris— is that the meditation guy? You know, whatever he's going to say, you're probably going to believe it meditation-wise, you know. Um, if you need some— to, to hear an MMA fighter like really speaking, this is a great source for that, this podcast. She needs some curator, but I mean, like, I'm the guy.

I'm that.

Yeah, but even for this show, I'll make it quality. I'll make it look right. You can always trust me to do that. So come to me for— that show was the coolest stand-up show of all time.

It was a fun show. It was a really good show. And it was a show that I remember you created from scratch. I remember when you were doing it at the Lab at the Improv, that tiny little room. You were doing it for free. And I was like, what are you doing? Basically the same way that you were talking about to me about my podcast. Like, what are you doing?

That's what you were saying. What are you doing doing a fucking show for 20 people? I'm like, this is so weird.

I'm like, Ari's telling stories. But I thought about it. I was like, it's probably a good idea to develop material that way. Oh yeah.

Yeah. No, a lot of people was like, hey, we're doing a show. It's about heartbreak this week or this month, or it's about drugs, whatever. And they go, all right, let me, let me, I have a story. Let me get all my thoughts down. You know, all the metaphors and stuff, that stuff, flowery stuff you put on them that Jay is so good at and stuff. But like, then they became a lot of people's like, that's my closer in my special now. I had no bit. I thought of it because of this. It became, you know, the biggest thing I had in my act. Isn't that nuts? It's nuts. Yeah. Because I loved giving people an excuse to, like, write something.

It was also such a fun show because it was comedy outside of, like, regular stand-up. It was like another avenue, and, and it was a really fun thing to do, you know. And the thing about, like, the gatekeeping of it is, like, those people had nothing to do with it, and they had all the power. They had all the power. And by do— by just exercising it in that way, and then everybody talking about how gross it was, nobody ever trusted them again.

And the thing is, some of the stuff they do, they're like, we need some diversity. And, and it'd be like, I don't think you're wrong. I think you don't want it to be all the same thing. But there's something me and Eric Abrams came up with is it's a diversity of experience. Yeah, is bigger. Two white dudes is not what we're talking about. If it's like Ali Siddiq's life, closer to Gary Owen's life than mine. Mhm. You know, Gary Owen and Ali are closer to each other than me or Gary, you know? Right, right, right. So that's what I want, different whatever. And they have these checklists you would go to in LA. Here are the gays, get one of these 7. Here are the Black. And it was like, well, I'm not gonna fuck up my product. No way.

You, at the end of the day, it has to be a meritocracy.

So, so then we would just work harder, which a lot of people aren't willing to do. And it's like, well, there's a great Black woman in Indianapolis, uh, she's not in LA or New York, but let's get her. She has great stories. Miss Pat, right? There's a great Black comic in Houston, and he has these great stories about prison. Let's get him. I'll take— they're not on these lists. Yeah, you just got to work a little harder to make your shit good. You know, it's like Seinfeld letting everybody else shine, right?

But it's like forced diversity without the merit, without good quality comedy. Yeah, yeah. But it's just gatekeepers fuck themselves, really, because now that we don't need them anymore Like, they're— what do those people do? Well, those people that were running Comedy Central, what do they do now?

There's no jobs. Well, the thing is, with like, with like cabs overstepping, that made Uber possible. Yeah. You know, so let's focus on the positive of this.

And then the Uber people kept robbing and murdering people.

Yep.

So they, uh, they just got Waymos.

Yeah, exactly. They'll be gone too. Take advantage. Yep. Yep. How many coke addicts do you need driving? You're like, bro, that's a red light, please stop.

I mean, they barely fucking vet those people.

Yeah, but the cool thing is because it's easier to film and because I have friends that are fucking billionaires, you know, it's like we can actually get it done now. It's a golden age for this. It is. To be able to make a TV show level thing on our own.

Well, look at even movies like Theo and David Spade made a fucking movie. On their own. Self-financed it and it's doing well.

They go, we know how much it's gonna cost, we'll do it. We're rich. It's incredible.

Yeah, it's a cool time.

I mean, we made our budget back day one. That's awesome. On a massive project, flying in 23 comics, you know, putting them all up, paying them all. Amazing. They're cutting in on the shares. We've never done that before.

So are you going to do that in the next season as well?

I don't know if there's going to be a next season. A lot of this was just a— there was a hole in my, in my resume where this show didn't end on the terms it should have ended on.

And that's why it's called The End. Yeah. Aha. Yeah.

It's a play on words for story titles too. You know, like the end, but like, I like it. So I just had to get it done right. Nice. Nice. And then all these huge comp— like Shane Gillis, who when he was like an open micer was like, all these guys like, I want to eventually do that show. Yeah. And the show went away. In the interim, he's like supplanting the Philadelphia 76ers so he can do comedy, you know? But he's like, I'd love to do that show. Dude, I have 4 people take private jets to come to the show.

That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing.

Fuck yeah, it was, it was— I'm so happy with it. It came out right. Everyone who's seen it is like, oh, this is like not just something you did, this is like a TV show. Yeah, we—

it's like, I'm so happy. That's awesome. Yeah, I love it. I'm so happy to hear that, dude.

And that's great, that prolog that, that guy did. You should— I'll send you, I'll send you $2 off. Um, I'll just pay. Yeah, we said we had to figure out a way. Me and O'Neill and Abrams, we all like writing it, we're like, I have to figure out a way to bridge the gap of this not happening to the end and what happened and everything without being too woe is me. And so we got this claymation guy who was like, yeah, let's just fill it with fucking punchlines so it doesn't become that like— I love Schultz, but I a little like, they couldn't keep us down. I'm like, I don't want to do any of that. I don't want to be earnest. Right. So let's bridge the gap without, without ever being serious.

Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was like a 3-minute prolog you get for free. Yeah. Yeah. That's William Child. That's Tim Key's video. Oh, wow.

How did they do that? Did they use real claymation?

Oh yeah, dude. In a time of AI where everyone's doing easy stuff. He is painstakingly— it takes him a day to build each one of those characters. That's 3-day work. And then the backdrop takes another day or two.

And how long does it take to actually do the animation?

A long time. All day long. So if you have notes, you're like, dude, I need those notes before I start filming. This, this is click, move, click, move, click, move.

You gotta go back and erase the stuff that, you know, the wires and shit too. Are they wires? Or just moving the clay? Has to be held up because the clay would fall. Right, right, right.

Well, there's wires in the arms. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't necessarily have to have wires like to make it stand. What is going on with his tits?

Well, I think that's music video.

What's in that bowl? Ew. Oh, he's making a— this is like a turd. He did a Trippie Redd video that's really good.

That's awesome, dude. Yeah, that's cool that people are still doing stuff like that, like the old school, the way they did King Hong Kong. Well, here's what I noticed too.

When you start talking to some of these artists, you know, like some of my stage designs and stuff like that, like for America's Sweetheart, what I had was like this idea that like, what if we left society? How long till nature would just take back over? And we're like, let's do that with plants. And then the first ones are like, so expensive. They're like, oh, I can't. Okay, I gotta rethink. I can't. That's far, far out of the— I'll spend a lot, but not that much out of the budget. But then you tell these people like, well, here's what trying to do. I'm trying to say— you say the whole thing, like, here's what I'm trying to get across, here's what I'm trying to say. Like, we're too caught up in the news and stuff, and if we all just like, whatever. And then they go, fuck, dude, that's a good— okay, we can do it at cost. And then him, Anthony Shepard, they were both like these great artists. They were like, fuck, they stole your fucking show from you. Hold on, that's fucking bullshit. I can bring my cost way down. Let's— we can do this.

Oh, still very expensive, but they're like, I want to be part of something.

That's dope.

You know, if Tarantino was like, you want to hold a boom mic? I'm like, yes, I would do that for you to be part of something.

Yeah, there we go. That's fucking dope, dude. It's what? William Child. That's his Instagram account. Whoa, that's me.

Look at you deliver me a message. Oh, you're an asshole. Okay, you know what that is? Tell me that I was a— look at that, dude. That's real. But I don't know. February 18th, 2010, the show was born. Third most vapid city in America. Me and 6 comedians telling stories about psychedelic drugs. Holy shit. Only 14 people showed up, but goddamn, it was the best show I'd ever seen. February—

and that's awesome.

A lot of hard work, completely on my own, with help from no one. I got a TV deal, and that helped launch the careers of so many great comics. Fat ones who lost weight. Fat ones who somehow keep getting fat. Men who want to influence elections. Men who go on to normalize child molestation. And then, with a lot of hope, without an ending.

That's awesome.

The irony's sickening me. Wait, wait, watch this part. You're in it. Hold on. I mean, it might have been the drugs. Without an ending. The irony's sickening me. Wait, Rush, right after this, hold on. I mean, it might have been the drugs. Wait, I think there's nothing.

Yeah, there's only clips of it, I guess.

There's a— there's the moment where I have to like go, I realized I had to be a man, and not just a man who would go on to tap Shane Gillis twice with witnesses, by the way. And that's you and Norman raising your hands. It's like, I witnessed it. I'm like, let's just have some fun, dude. Let's have some fun. I got Duncan to do a theme song on the way out of his episode. Oh really? His story is about taking his kids to a Taylor Swift, um, Taylor Swift concert film and how awful it is. He thinks she's a 15,000-year-old vampire. He has this long song, goes, you can see it, she's feeding off them, she gets bigger as they start cheering. It's so funny. And it's Duncan, he's so out there. And I'm like, hey Duncan, he does this like song, he breaks down every one of her songs. He goes, it's just this. And I was like, you know those crazy GarageBand songs you've been making for 25+ years? You want to do the theme song just for that episode? Just the— and he goes, yeah, 100%. So it's this like demonic song about being a 15,000-year-old vampire.

It's a Taylor Swift original song. And you don't have to okay it with a network. You're like, let's just do it. I was like, what do you use for credit? He made up some crazy credit for his band. That's awesome. That's amazing.

Amazing. Nobody's embraced like that kind of AI technology more than Duncan. He's always sending me things that he's working on.

Like always, he does it all day long. Those GarageBand songs he used to make, it wasn't— it was just him. I know, a crazy weird time ago.

Yeah, the Sunset days. Yeah, it was like, oh my God. Yeah, that's awesome, dude. Okay, so that's, uh, it's available on AriShaffir.com.

AriShaffir.com. .com. I wonder why people didn't know how to find it.

But is it still there? Like, if you go to AriTheGreat.com, does it take you to AriShaffir.com?

I don't know anything about me. There's no way I'm going to pay those fees every year. If I know anything about me and my people, I doubt I still have that. But, all right. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I let the YMH staff— I had a production card. You know, you need a production card at the end. One of them says YMH, then Eric Abrams, director. It's his. And I was like, fuck. The one I was using was just a still frame from this not happening, just my dick pixelated. And I was like, put my thing on that. I hate the— I'm not a producer, whatever. And I didn't have it. And then we couldn't use anything with this not happening. So it's like, don't. And I was like, fuck, I need another one. I'm off in the jungle. So I told YMH, I was like, guys, you guys are all fucking idiots. Make me whatever production card you want and I will use it. And then they were like, we're going to make 7. I was like, all right. And I've seen a few of them and they're all so retarded. They're all so— one of them is me being a giant coin out of my my fucking giant nose.

It's just so retarded. Oh, I love working with people I like.

Yeah, Tom's awesome. It's nice having a guy like that that's like really just acquired an enormous amount of funds. Yeah, it does whatever the fuck he wants. Fun funds. Yeah, yeah. And his Netflix show is fucking great.

Oh, it's so out there.

It's so crazy, but it's like perfect for him. It's like his mind. All right, let's wrap this bitch up. Um, tomorrow, Protection Parks. First protection parks in quite some time, dude.

I would get recognized here or there when I was traveling, not much. I'll tell you a couple things I saw. One, people know Shane Gillis's name except in Brazil, and then they only know Ralfi Bastos's name. Oh really? That's the only comic they've ever heard of.

He's a big comic. Yeah, I had him on the show.

Really?

Yeah, he was great. Good dude.

But I'll tell you this though, there's a lot of business and shit that gets caught up in this. Who's interviewing which politician and what— oh, this guy's doing this, or he's friends with this 'And all the money and everything, and like, am I doing well enough?' People try to do that keep-up game. 'This guy's getting more views on his clips. I should start doing shorter stuff.' Anyone I told that didn't recognize me, when it came up what my job was, first I'd try to avoid it, but if they kept persisting, like, 'No, no, for real, what do you do?' I'm like, 'All right, well, I'm a stand-up comedian.' I mean, this is 10 for 10 countries. Everybody would be like, 'What? What do you do?' What do you mean? I'm like, I'm a stand-up comedian. And they go, what, like as a hobby? I'm like, no, as a living. They're like, what? Grandma, come here. This guy does stand-up. Like, what do you mean, with a microphone? I'm like, yeah. He goes, that's so cool.

That's so cool.

I'm like, where, just in New York? I'm like, in the country, in the world, really. Like, what? You pay your rent on this? I'm like, yeah, and then some. Like, no fucking way. They couldn't get over how cool it was, and they didn't know if I'm successful or not. They just know I do this. Bro, we have the coolest job, and I've tested this, in the world. There's no cooler job you could tell people that they'll be like that reaction. They start smiling just at the idea of the job. Can they actually exist? Wow. And that's what we do. And the high-level ones and the low-level, we're all doing the same shit. We're all just coming up with a better dick joke to just entertain some strangers. Even gay Ian, even gay fucking Ian, hole in the wall, blowing a dude, and they go, oh, I just got an idea for a bit. That's Cool. Let me— hold on, I gotta write this down. Hold on, I'll jerk you while I write it down.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's an amazing job. It's kind of incredible. We live a very blessed life for sure.

Yeah, it's just— yeah, it's just, I don't know. I mean, yeah, it's fun to just focus on some positives and realize the negatives are nothing compared to the positives.

The keeping up with the Joneses stuff and the paying attention to the numbers. I mean, obviously that's easy for me to say. That you shouldn't do it, but you shouldn't do it.

Well, there's this thing—

Just concentrate on what you're doing and enjoy it.

I was talking to Maddie Weiner, really funny comic, and she was like, you know, all these people, and everybody really liked— she's gonna be a star— and she's like, all these people are getting clips, it's crowd work, I don't do crowd work. And it was like, well, then you shouldn't do those clips. Your road's just gonna be a little longer than them, but don't think about it like that. Like, just do the shit you're good at. Yeah. You know, and then eventually you'll get found out. I mean, just do whatever you do, whatever you want to do, but don't let them decide. No, I need to write an under 60-second bit. It's got to have a punchline at 59 seconds or I can't put it on YouTube Shorts. Like, that's a dumb way to be building your stuff. Absolutely. Big Jay does kind of crowd work that no one's ever done. Long-form crowd work with—

yeah, but he's also been doing it for so long and he has that kind of personality and and like easygoing style that makes it work.

You see Big Jay at like when somebody heckles him, like an angry heckle, not just like a, I wanna be part of it. They're like, you fuckers suck. He doesn't, I get worked up. He just goes, oh, what was it that you don't like? Like almost as if he's on mushrooms. He's like, no, yeah, I could see that. But what specifically? I just wanna know.

He's an easygoing guy.

Yeah, he's just like, let's mine this. For laughs. Yeah, I might get caught up screaming.

Well, he's also done so many shows in New York where that must happen so often, you develop strategies.

Yeah, you got practice at it. Yeah. Big Jay, my co-host of Legion of Skanks.

All right, that's right, you're back. Legion of Skanks, you're running it now that Dave Smith has decided to be a political commentator. Well, it's 3 for Life.

I'm not running it, I'm just part of it.

No, no, no, you're running it.

Oh, print it, Joke World.

I heard that you were the leader of the Legion of Skanks.

I am the leader of Skanks. Well, I'm the president.

In the past, you've already— like, you ran for president. I think you won. I think—

yeah, I won. Dude, one day on one of these podcasts, we gotta talk about the pres— the presidential election of Legion of Skanks. It was a 3-month process of just non-stop creativity and stupidity. We'll talk about it tomorrow. Okay. Oh, Shane was involved. Yeah, Shane's my vice president. There you go.

All right, let's wrap this up. I love you. Uh, I love you too. It's great to see you back.

Yeah, dude, there's a bunch of times where I thought about you out there where I'm like, you would love— NASCAR Lines want him. Like, Joe Rogan would love the Mayan temples. You would love it.

I went to Chichen Itza once way back in the early days.

El Salvador, you would have loved. I'm sure, just with like, for the stuff you're into, there was so much. All right, anyway, I love you, buddy.

I love you too, Jamie.

Hi everybody as well. We love you, Jamie.

Bye.

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